The boys’ blog books arrived today from Lulu.com. They are perfect – the boys immediately took them out and read them. And Will didn’t even complain about having to write in his blog tonight.

Now I feel obligated to write in my blog.  I have taken a nice 10 day vacation between posts. I think it was a combination of the cold weather, maybe being a little burned out of writing, and the stress of worrying if (thanks to congress failing to do their job) there will be a furlough of federal employees starting this April.

Susanna has started school again – her last semester. That means that she won’t be free to work on house projects during the week. And probably not much during the weekends as homework starts to pile up.

We have made some progress on Will’s room. I have most of the drywall up, and the window repaired/repainted. I’ll try to get pictures up later this week.  I hadn’t spent much time at all in the workshop – I’ve been waiting for the weekend temperatures to get above freezing. Working on the power tools when it is too cold outside sucks. Even after I get the workshop warmed up, the heavy tools are still bitter cold to the touch.

The weather today gives hope for warmer weather. I know by Sunday we will be back into winter, but hopefully not for that much longer.

Or, a visit to Madame Tussaud’s museum. Of course that isn’t all we did. But it is most of what we did. We were a bit slow getting out of the house (we couldn’t find Targa’s invisible fence collar that had been misplaced – but don’t worry the dogs found it while we were gone and chewed it up), but made it by lunch time. Will picked Mexican for lunch.

After lunch we walked through the museum. We then walked back to the train station, stopping at the New York Library for a short break (in the kids section). We were back in New Haven by dinner time (an exciting dinner at IKEA), and home before bed time.

Waiting for the train in New Haven

 

 

Yesterday, Susanna and I took a road trip to New Bedford, MA. We planned to visit the New England Demolition and Salvage company.  The plan was to look at possibly getting a new door for the kitchen. In hindsight, I should have measured for a new bedroom door. Our bedroom door is the only really crappy replacement door in the house (hollow core, flat panel).  There are tons of doors that match the style of our house, most for $50-$60. Exterior doors are closer to $150-$200.

We wound up not buying anything at the salvage store – but it is a great place to get ideas. They have an acre of claw-foot tubs. Thousands of doors and windows. And countless other treasures.

We made it a day trip, with lunch after the salvage store, and a visit to some more antique stores (and a flea market in Fall River that wasn’t worth stopping at). We aren’t really in the market for anything specific for the house, but it is nice to get out and explore.  We were home in time for dinner and a movie.

Merry Christmas! Our family had a great Christmas day. Susanna and I went to Christmas Eve services last night (yes, I don’t know what is wrong with me… but it was nice to get out of the house). The boys arrived this morning and will be here until Sunday. The plan was to let them get settled from transition and then open gifts. The boys decided 15 seconds after arriving that they had settled long enough to open gifts.

We all enjoyed a relaxed Christmas day. Susanna started reading “50 Shades of Grey.” I helped the boys with their Christmas projects. Ben spent most of the day assembling a complicated toy roller-coaster. He doesn’t actually need much help (only a little help at the end getting things running smoothly – it won’t be much longer before he gets to the point where I won’t be of any help).

Will had a lesson on carving wood at the Mystic Seaport in on a field-trip with his school earlier this year. He had enjoyed carving, and had asked for carving chisels for Christmas. Today, I helped him get set up in the workshop, and I milled him some lumber to carve with his new chisels. I think he likes carving because it is something he can show the rest of us how to do.

I first traced some letter so he could carve his name. Then we milled a piece of sapele (actually two) and he carved a sign for his room. We hung it on some sash chain and brass hooks outside of his door. Maybe tomorrow he will make a sign for his brother’s room.

It is that time of year again. Time to look back on the year. Time to get the blog printed into a book. Not only do I need to get this blog printed, I promised the boys that I will print their blogs as well.

Last year I used blog2print.com. The site make it easy to print a hardback book from a blog, and the quality of the printed book is good.  One of the things I didn’t like with the service was there was no control over the size of the pictures in the book. The quality of the images was decent, but they were all a little smaller than I would have liked.  The book also doesn’t include comments. The comments aren’t really an issue for my blog, but for Will’s and Ben’s blogs, the comments would be nice.

I’m trying a new path for the boys. I haven’t decided what do do with this blog.  I am using BlogBooker.com.  The service is free (though to get it to use high-resolution photos you must make a donation (about $14). The service takes the blog and converts it to a print quality PDF.  I can then upload the PDF to Lulu.com.

With BlogBooker.com and Lulu.com, I can only (easily) get the book in a 6×9 or A4 (letter) softcover book.  I probably could find a way to get it to one of the hardbound book sizes for Lulu.com, but it would require a couple of extra steps. Another advantage is that I could open up the Lulu.com books if grandparents wanted to get a copy of the boys’ blogs.   BlogBooker.com also allows comments to be automatically included.

If anyone has a better way to take a blog and publish it, please let me know.

Yesterday, the Targa and Tucker decided to take a little vacation from hanging out at home. They took off on the hike I took with the boys and them. We were pretty far in the woods when Tucker got a scent of something and off he went. Targa went in pursuit.

It was early afternoon when we went hiking. They hadn’t returned by nightfall, and we all were starting to get worried.  The boys started talking about putting up “Lost Dog” signs on every third telephone pole on Sunday if they didn’t come back before this morning. We even took a drive around the block to see if we could find them.

Nothing. Not even a Tucker bark.  We went to bed in an extra quiet, dog empty, house. Will woke up a couple of times in the night to check if they got back. I had strange dreams about finding the dogs, only to wake up to discover it was a dream (but thankfully they were dreams – I also had a dream where Will and Ben decided to steal from a toy store – maybe I had too much wine before bed).

Finally about 4 AM I woke up to the distant sounds of Tucker barking.  Yes, he is loud enough to hear through the window when he is far away in the field across the street. I went outside and called for them, but it was too dark to go looking for them.

Will woke up at six and went downstairs to find the dogs sitting at the back door. Dirty and very very tired. Tired enough to not protest a bath.