November Backlog

Right now my favorite thing about November was the fact that I didn't take very many pictures.

Since we don't really have any Thanksgiving decorations we went straight from Halloween to Christmas:

Lincoln hung the candy canes. He has some grouping skills to learn.

This is the gingerbread house for Inkom.

Our house.

We went down to St. George for Thanksgiving.

Lincoln got to sit at the kids table.

 

Angel put together these flower arrangements (one of her lesser known talents).

Then we spent the rest of the month reading Christmas stories.

October Backlog

Two months behind is pretty good. Although the only reason it isn't three is because I have nothing to write about September. I'm sure it was great but since I apparently didn't take any pictures I can't be sure the month actually occurred.

We took lots of pictures in October.

We had lots of apples on our tree. Lincoln likes to help pick them.

Lincoln went to the park a lot.

And made silly faces at his dad (getting a haircut in between).

The big event was the Long Beach/Disneyland trip.
We had so much fun at the Disneyland Halloween event last year that we thought we would go do it again (plus this was going to be the last chance we could go again while Lincoln was still free).
Angel and I decided to fly down a couple days before the rest of the group and stay aboard the historic Queen Mary. For those who don't know, the Queen Mary is an old luxury cruise liner that use to sail the Atlantic and also served as a troop transporter during WWII. It is now welded to the dock in Long Beach and was prominently featured in the final episode of Arrested Development.

Also, it's haunted... by this guy:

OK, this guy wasn't on the ship. He was actually in the back room of the awesome $1 bookstore we found and spent lots of time in in Long Beach (this is a great idea for anyone looking for a store to start somewhere near me).

The ship had lots of cool Art Deco style to it and we spent a lot of time just wandering around looking at stuff.
Our room was one of the original first-class cabins. The definition of first-class has changed a bit over the last 80 years. This one wouldn't quite pass these days. Although it is a ship so I suppose space is limited. It did have neat details though:

The toilet lever.

The, uh, sink with soap elevator.

The bathing choices (I tried to be salty but they only let me get fresh).

The radio, I mean... heater?

The blow hole (there were like five of these in the room).

Cool curved hallways and psychedelic carpet.

The swimming pool.

The cool mechanical map that showed where the ship was.

We went on a tour of the most haunted areas of the ship and this is the ghost picture I took:

The ghost answers to the name Jooj and is rumored to be the most beautiful passenger who ever boarded the ship.

We spent some time in Long Beach eating delicious food, looking at cheap books among other things and getting excited to go to Disneyland. The next morning we attached plastic bags full of books to the outside of our backpacks and, because we're urban adventurers, we gave public transportation $3.75 and two hours of our time to take us from Long Beach to Disneyland.

Angel and I went in early that morning before the rest of the crew arrived with Lincoln so we could do some rides. Like the teacups:

Going...

Going...

Gone.

The teacups are Angel's favorite.
Since Lincoln is a freakishly tall two year old he gets to ride on big kid rides.

In line for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (he rode the 'fast train' at least four or five times).

Waiting for the new Star Tours to start.

In the waiting room for the emergency room ride.

He was tall enough for Space Mountain but we decided since they were projecting scary ghouls on the walls and stuff for Halloween maybe it wasn't such a good idea. He did do Haunted Mansion/Nightmare Before Christmas a couple times though. And his super cool black eye injury got him/us a front of the line pass to Buzz Lightyear.

For the Halloween event Lincoln dressed up like Stitch, Angel was Lilo and they got Wolverine to put on an Elvis suit and go with them.

You know, you'd think we would have taken a lot of pictures of this but, we really didn't.
Other random people took pictures of us...
And there was a pretty constant chorus of "Elvis" around us everywhere we went all day. Some people even figured out the connection between us.

Lincoln is super cute even when he isn't dressed as Stitch (which he wasn't for a little while because he was super sweaty and uncomfortable).

Lincoln showed off his hat and cape.

Goofy was impressed.

Mom still won't let him ride the real Dumbo ride, Doh!

Pass me the mint for the julep.

A good time was had by all and it truly was...

Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

Since we didn't get many pictures at Disneyland we did a bit of a photo shoot later.

I'm sorry some of those are a little disturbing. None of them quite made the Christmas card.

That mostly tells the story of our Halloween except for the pumpkins I carved. In case anyone else hasn't figured this out, Dremel tools are awesome for carving pumpkins. Our little garden only grows little pumpkins so, I strung them together and made this:

We put them in Lincoln's window so that no neighborhood kids would set themselves on fire on our porch.

I also hooked up a speaker out on the porch to play scary music like Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson.

And since Halloween is the end of October I'll end this with the way we ended Halloween:

Back Splash

I just want to preface this post with the fact that we have pretty much the best home teacher we could want right now. He is currently an x-ray technician (I think, or something like unto it) but in a previous life was a carpenter for ten years. Last summer he helped us replace our front door, this summer he crawled into our very cramped, very dirty, very inhospitable crawlspace with me on an unsuccessful search for Angel's ring and over the past month or so he helped us replace our kitchen back splash.

Since I don't have much foresight you get this picture of Lincoln making Valentine's cards two years ago as a before picture of the back splash.

Not a great view of it but you get the idea and you can see how cute Lincoln was. If you can't tell, the back splash is the same as the counter. It wasn't that bad but it was a lot of brown and the cabinets, back splash and counters all seems to blend together. That and it was kind of dark. Actually, the kitchen was pretty dark.

We bought some tiles we liked that were on clearance and put them in the garage to age for about a year and a half (in case you didn't know, you're supposed to age tiles for at least a year before you install them...I'm pretty sure anyway). Our home teacher Brother Bryan knew about the tile and must have been itching to do some tiling because he took the initiative to invite himself over to help me tear our kitchen apart the week before Thanksgiving.

We broke out the circular saw, some hammers and pry bars and shortly after, this was the result:

I was going to post some in-progress pictures but, they're actually quite boring so I'm just going to post some final product pictures that I just took.

Lights on, no under-cabinet lighting.

Lights off, under-cabinet on.

Lights on, under-cabinet on.

We're really happy with the results. The LED under-cabinet lighting I did on my own with LED strips that I cut and soldered and wired and whatnot. It brings the kitchen more like our style and adds a nice accent.

Answers to some possible questions you probably don't have:

Q: Did you lay and space each of those 1" tiles by hand?
A: Don't be ridiculous. They come in 12" sheets already spaced 1/8".

Q: Did you have to cut any tiles?
A: Yes.

Q: Um, how did you do that?
A: Poorly, at first. I tried a small hand grinder and got jagged edges that broke of in crooked ways.

Q: Then what did you do?
A: Well, then I tried a wet tile saw. It was freezing cold and got pretty similar results.

Q: Did you give up?
A: Yes... I mean no. I tried various methods like building a little support guide out of scrap tile to keep the glass from breaking in weird ways with the tile saw. The pieces kept freezing to the concrete (it's December) and the glass tiles still broke all broken like.

Q: So, then you gave up?
A: Yes, I then gave up on the tile saw, which is what I assume you meant by your vague question (you're a terrible interviewer). I bought a little glass cutter and after some trial and error figured out a pretty reliable method using the cutter, some rulers and two pairs of pliers to score and break the tiles one at a time.

Q: How many tiles did you have to individually cut?
A: 87 cut tiles made it onto the wall. Then there were a bunch of other tests and failures.

Q: LEDs are expensive.
A: That's not a question, and they are fairly expensive if you buy them as LED lighting from a hardware or department store. However, if you are willing to do a bit of soldering and already have old ac/dc power supplies from old electronics laying around they're much cheaper. I bought a 16.8' strip of LEDs for about $15.00 on Amazon.

Q: Will you come do that to my kitchen?
A: If you're willing to pay me twice as much as you would a professional and won't complain when you get results half to a quarter as good then, yes, yes I will (and you'll need to pay travel expenses).

(confession: all three of those pictures are with lights and under-cabinet on. The first was taken with a flash, the second with no flash and too fast of a shutter speed and the third with no flash and normal settings. They just happened to all look pretty close to how I described them above.)