Wish I could share this with my Dad

Happy Boxing Day

It was a Lego filled Christmas at our house. Wish my nephew could visit and help us play with them all. This is a picture of part of the display on our piano.

The Palace movie theater on the left and the firehouse and city hall in the middle were all from previous years. The firehouse got separated out of the box too long before it got built, and is missing some parts that are around here somewhere, but not yet located.

The building on the right is the Emporium, which we got and built yesterday. It is so awesome!

Not pictured but also atop the piano is the haunted mansion in a similar size and style as the other buildings, but with no flat sides. I think I also have a village shop that, like the firehouse, had the instruction separated from the bricks. I keep all the instructions and sort my bricks by color but it's still a slog to find the right parts and we haven't found the time yet. Maybe when my nephew visits!

Later in the day a friend of the house who works for Lego brought by a gift... a Lego set to build the Tower of Orthanc from Lord of the Rings. It looks huge. It has a lot of black bricks.

Max received a smaller set from The Lego Movie. Both boys received small sets for little creatures and such too. 

And there's more! Xbox games for Lego Hobbit and Lego Movie were under the tree as well. 

A very Lego-y holiday indeed.

Meanwhile, we have a pirate ship from a previous year that is kind of falling apart because it's been on a busy shelf, and a Christmas village themed set we used to build each year but don't anymore, plus a Lego train that is in a box. I think we're starting to run out of room unless we get rid of non-Lego items in our life.

Merry happy!

I don't recall having a stocking as a kid, which is not a surprise, since we weren't Christian. Maybe I tried to staple up a sock one year?

Jim's mom made all of these stockings and they fill me with unbelievable joy every year when we hang them up. It wouldn't be the same if we had some generic stocking from a box store. I feel so lucky that Max was born before Granny Patty died. Alicia is making stockings for some folks in our extended circle who weren't as lucky.

Mine has Patty's original Girl Scout membership pin and a ham radio on it. (She had her ham license too.) Max's has the Golden Gate Bridge on his.

Jim's is a newer one, but he has the one she made from when he was a wee lad.

don't order yet - there's more!

I forgot one book!!!! We listened to Alif the Unseen on the way back from Texas.

It was enjoyable but had significant logistical problems that Jim and I bonded over for the rest of the drive.

A Book A Month In 2014

My goal was to read a book a month this year.

This goal was a tad sad in some ways because I love reading and wish I could read a book a week, but 12 books in a year is better than previous years where I was lucky if I got through just a few. Reading time was definitely harder to find at the end of the year, but if you include one audio book, I succeeded in my goal. Having the goal definitely helped me to choose reading during my free time. 

There were also plenty of kid books read aloud to Max. Even though he's reading real books on his own (including Harry Potter) it's still nice to read together, and he still like easy books sometimes. We started reading Up the Down Staircase to Max. I loved this book as a kid, but Max wasn't really in to it. The last book we read out loud that held his attention was The Hobbit. 

Here's the year:

J - Homeland by Cory Doctorow
F - Jennifer Government by Max Barry
M - The Finno-Ugrian Vampire by Noemi Szecsi 
A - The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
M - Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (and Ajax Penumbra 1969) by Robin Sloan
J - Destroyer Angel by Nevada Barr
J - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A - Spell or High Water by Scott Meyer
S - Tigerman by Nick Harkaway
O - Suspect by Robert Crais
N - Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon and Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (Audiobooks)
D - Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Best book of the year: Tigerman by a mile. It doesn't matter what this book is about. I loved reading it and I want you to read it. I found myself putting it down at times just to try and make it last longer. Other books this year had their moments, but Tigerman is the one I wish I could read again for the first time.

Highest achievement book: Crying of Lot 49. Never need to read Pynchon again, but glad I got through one. Actually, I'd probably read more Pynchon before I read more Dave Eggers.

I reviewed the earlier books over on LiveJournal, but haven't posted these:

Suspect - Fun. I like big strong dogs.

Telegraph Ave - The local flavor made this one enjoyable. I don't know anything about jazz. If you don't like jazz and don't like Berkeley or Oakland, this might not be the book for you. I want to like Chabon's books more than I actually do, and plan to read more of them.

Alif - We enjoyed this tale and it had many wonderful attributes but there were logistical inconsistencies that drove us nuts. It took me forever to realize that Alif is pronounced very much like Alice and that this book is bit like Alice in Wonderland, which I have never read, so not a surprise that this part didn't jump out at me.

Cinder - This was the hardest book to get through, and that includes Lot 49. It's sort of YA so I was trying to figure out why I found this book really easy to put down and didn't look forward to picking it up. I think it's because it's a retelling of the Cinderella story, therefore you know the major plot points (who knew retelling fairytales would be an end of year theme for me) and so what really matters is the stuff in-between and that part was not well paced. Even the extra plot points were very predictable and it was just a trudge to finish.

I haven't decided if I'll keep the same goal for 2015, but my goal books include:
Madam Ambassador by Eleni Kounalakis (non-fiction)
Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville (a missed classic)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (also a missed classic)

Seems a bit of a heavy list, so I'll try to round it out with fluff. Maybe some Lev Grossman 

Needy car

We fixed the van before, during and after our trip to Austin which did nothing to make me feel like 60+ hours of driving was cheaper than flying.  

What a shock absorber should look like.  

What ours looked like. 

This happened just a few blocks from the house. The mechanic could not figure out how it happened but the shocks were 150,000 miles old, so maybe just old age more than any traumatic event.  

December holidays

There's so much I want to accomplish that I don't get to, but for once I actually looked at how many Hanukkah candles we have before buying more. 

The answer: I have about as many candles as I have dreidels*, which is to say, many, but not enough to last 8 nights, which might be fine, who is home for 8 nights anyway? but I think this year I'll try to leave no candles and that can just be the number I remember each year. 

There are always new and fancy candle colors or designs I covet anyway, and the price of the post-Hanukkah sale candles isn't worth losing them or having them melt or whatnot. 

For the first time, Max went with me to the store with all the fun Hanukkah stuff. This is because he no longer believes in Hanukkah Harry, or St Nicholas or the tooth fairy, so I wanted to show him the store. Probably was more temptation for him than I was prepared to deal with, but now we are prepared for Advent, St Nicholas Day, and Hanukkah. Christmas and Solstice are still not completed but getting there!

  

*The dreidels will last more than 8 nights presumably.