Happy New Year’s Day!
Happy New Year’s Day everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season — I know I certainly had a great one.
I had a great Christmas this year as usual. I really feel blessed this time of year when the family comes together and the cards all come in from relatives across the country. Mom flew up to see the baby and have Christmas with us, and I got to play and bond with baby Parker for a whole week. I was really glad to be able to see both Mom and Dad this year, and Amme and I had an all around great week with our families. I got some fantastic new toys this year, but I’m not the bragging type, so I’ll just say I am humbled by the generosity of all in my family (which includes Amme’s family).
We’ve been getting inundated with snow this winter. Something I was afraid I’d not see again after the terrible winter we had last year. I believe we’re up to 4 or 5 major snow storms this year. And today we’re getting another 5-8 inches on top of the 8 we got two days ago! I can’t wait to go to the mountain for some serious powder carving on my snowboard!
Trevor came up again this year and spent Christmas with his mother before heading up north to visit with us. Alyssa got Guitar Hero 3 for Christmas and got Amme and all of us guys hooked on it. After arriving back in Bangor I borrowed GH 2 from my friend Carl, then rented GH 3 and We Love Katamari, so we’ve pretty much been playing PS2 non stop for the past few days. We’ve beat both Guitar Hero games on easy mode and are half way through both on medium difficulty.
Trevor is a minor scrabble deity (he has to do EVERYTHING to an extreme) so I’ve been getting coaching from him on becoming a better player. I was fairly dreadful before (I had no strategy to speak of) so I’m excited to play more. Theres a great free program by http://www.ISC.ro that lets you play scrabble with other people or computers, and they’re all rated so you know everyone’s relative skill level. I was playing earlier today and almost got trounced by Trevor came to my rescue during the last few seconds of play to win by a scant 12 points.
Every year I hold a New Years Eve party for the Caribou gang, and we usually have some fun idea or gimmick. This year Trevor brought up the idea of building a Rube Goldberg Machine, and though neither of us were sure that we’d have the drive to see it through to completion, it ended up being a great success. Trevor and I did the preliminary setup on the 29th and 30th, and Doody and Jason helped bring it all together on the 31st. Though our engineers Zach and Jesse couldn’t make it home, they were definitely there in spirit, and mentioned them a few times while trying to solve various problems. We also missed Jalbey, Johnny, Evan, Justin, and everyone else that couldn’t make it up. We hope they all had great times anyway.
Our original intent was to set it off and have it finish its task exactly as the ball dropped in times square (our task was to have a “Happy New Years” sign be raised on a string), but we were sure it would fail in some way at the crucial moment so we set it to record on the DVR just in case. That ended up being unnecessary, however, when it not only worked perfectly when the moment arrived, but also was timed to the second! We took a video of it with Doody’s camcorder and threw it on YouTube, you can check it out below or see it on my http://www.youtube.com/euicho page.
Again its been a fantastic holiday season and thank you to everyone in my life for making this past year great. I can’t wait to see what 2008 brings for us all.
