Thanksmas!

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and so has another Thanksmas. This is a time when the family gets together and celebrates Thanksgiving and also does a gift exchange. As you can see, we get quite the gathering at the house for a few days of good fun.

This year was the first year that Tammy's sister, Becky, and her husband Anthony were able to attend. They recently moved from Florida to Sierra Vista giving them the opportunity to join in the festivities.

As with every other Thanksmas, there is food, drink, more food and of course the video games. We mostly got together to play a bit of Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour, but we also had the opportunity to get a few games of Scene It! in as well. As for food, we had both a ham and turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. After a couple years of either roasting or buying the turkey from Honeybaked Ham, deep frying the turkey for a couple of years then last year's AJ's adventure I decided to give a new method a try. 'Oil-less' frying of the turkey in an infrared cooker. It took about 3 hours to cook the 16lb bird, but it was easy and delicious. I will definitely continue on the trend of using this cooker. It doesn't get much easier.

Another one down - and many more to come!

Thanksgiving Feast

Can you find my little pilgrim?

Joshua had his Thanksgiving feast with his Kindergarten class. There are two K classes at his school, his class were the pilgrims and the other class were the Native Americans. They sang a few songs then headed out to have their feast. Not much to the feast though - just a cookie a cracker with cheese and some cupcake thingamabob.

It's pretty amazing that they can keep all the kids in one place like this for the feast - good times. :)

Urban Dare - again!

21 seconds.

That was the difference between first and second place for the Urban Dare Scottsdale race. Who came in first? Well, I can tell you it wasn't Ed and myself. I would have to say that the second place finish is mighty good considering that the last time that I actually run of any distance was last year's Urban Dare!

In the picture here along with Ed and I are Jen and Paul. They 'challenged' us to this race. We ended up beating them by around 40 minutes. It would have been nice to win the event, and there were probably a number of areas where we could have improved our time - number one being the ability to not cramp up during the race :) That would be my fault.

You can see more about the race here: http://urbandare.blogspot.com Check out the Scottsdale link.

Chess Anyone?

Today marked the first chess tournament that Joshua has ever participated in. It was not only Joshua's first tournament, but it was the first chess tournament experience for any of us! Little did we know that the tournament was going to last all day. It started with checkin at 8:30 in the morning and didn't finish until after 4:30 in the afternoon. Talk about a long day.

I would have to say that Joshua learned quite a bit during the tournament, from learning extreme patience (one of his games lasted over an hour!) to documenting proper notation of the moves throughout the game. He did well enough to earn a 5th place trophy! Even though he said it was really boring at times, he still wants to play in the next tourney. At least next time we know what to expect.