When Tut-Tuts Go Bad

In the morning we usually do Claire’s hair in some sort of tut.  Sarah is very good at this and creates the following:

 

I, on the other hand, never tutted my hair nor tutted any friend’s hair whilst growing up.  Our cat also was not tuttable so the first tuts I did were about 3 months ago.  Normally I go for the single tut, aka a pony tail.  Just pull hair to back and wrap.  The other day I wanted to try something more advanced, so I tried to do what Sarah does, aka top tuts.  This is what happened.

 

It is affectionately known as a mullet tut.  Embarrassing for all parties involved.  I took these out shortly after the pictures and went to my pony happy place.  But this just goes to show you that not all tuts are created equal.  Some are created as hideous reminders of the dangers associated with male engineers touching your hair.

Shortest Post Ever

Looking forward to the end of national blog posting month...

Saturday’s Festivities

Sorry, no pictures tonight.  But it has been a busy couple of days.  Yesterday we went to the Egger’s and Claire got to ride a horse for the first time.  To say she was ecstatic is an understatement.  We are hoping to go again and get some pictures.  Thanks Heather!

Then today Claire and I baked a pumpkin pie and took it to the fire station.  Claire was very excited to see the big fire trucks and Jack put on his fire truck onesie.  Claire got to sit inside the fire truck and the ambulance and was very happy about it.  Thanks Kevin!

Claire and I also took the leaves to the dump today.  On Friday “we” raked up 15 35-gal bags of sycamore leaves and “we” took them to the dump today.  Over 500 gallons of leaves later I can see the grass again.

Hope you all had a productive and fun Saturday!

Newfangled Gadgets

I am going two tie to previous post references into this post.  Literary dynamite.

When I was a young lad I was kind of a technophile and usually at the leading edge of gadgets and software trends.  When my opinion was sought I remembered thinking how weird it was that other people didn’t know about this stuff.  I figured I would never get old and that wouldn’t happen to me.  Well, yeah.

So the new thing is having a Blog, Digging things, Twitter, RSS Feeds, YouTube, Shutterfly, Gmail, etc.  Long story short, I don’t have any of the right software or the right accounts, I am the last human being without a Facebook account.  But Lappy 2.0 came with something called Windows Live Writer (WLW) and it is awesome!  If you have a Blog you should download it.

It allows you to compose your Blog offline and then just click a button and it uploads everything, pictures included.  If you have ever spent countless hours on Blogger waiting to upload 5 pictures you will now how great this is.  You can also add effects (notice the last three posts have all had different picture borders), change the size (no more small, medium, and large), and move them around.  How many countless hours have been spent trying to get the pictures to line up with the text (Janelle)?  WLW also allows you to preview it and is just generally more user friendly than Blogger.

But there is a trick.  For the pictures to work you also have to have a Picasa account.  Apparently everyone who has a Blogger account has a Picasa account so just log in with your Gmail account.  In it you need to make a folder called “Windows Live Writer”, then voila, everything works just like it should.  Its like having a Mac!

Anywho, I hope some of you find that helpful.  It has saved me much time and frustration.  I am sure there are other programs that work well and I know some of you have really nice Blogs and probably use even better stuff, but this was free and very helpful.

Cheers!

PS – The two previous post references were Windows Live Writer and the fact that am I old.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  We had much to be thankful for this year.  A new baby boy, a wonderful little girl, great family, a wonderful marriage, and so much more.  We hope everyone had a wonderful day and ate far more than they should have.

Our day started with a videoconference across three time zones.  The Noels were in Ohio with the Milmores and the Hoxworths were in France.  After some initial technical difficulties we got it sort of working.  Either way it was fun to reconnect with everybody.

Then after naps we headed to my parents house for Thanksgiving dinner with the fam.  It was fantastic and all the kids had a blast.  We tried to get a picture, but the time required to take a picture is directly proportional to the size of the family, so no dice.  We did get one of Jack (the least mobile Landon… for now) in his fire engine shirt.  He looked pretty sharp. And just to prove how dense we can be, Sarah and I wrapped gifts last night, but forgot to put the scissors away.  Not hard to figure out what happened next.  Sigh…

First (Unsupervised) Hair Cut

So yesterday was Claire’s first foray into hair maintenance.  We had some scissors in a drawer she could reach (I know, horrible parents) and she was able to get them and give herself a little trim.  It is difficult to see in the first picture, but the second one shows the evidence.

 

I am not sure how much she enjoyed it or if she has a future in it, but we have relocated the scissors so it will be a few more years before she gets to try again.

What Day is it?

Claire always knows the end of the week, because Friday is “Garbage Truck Day”.  When Andy gets home from a business trip, which is frequently on Friday, we tell Claire that the garbage truck will come, then Daddy will come home.  So it’s her one reference point, well, other than Family Dinner on Sunday and College Football Saturday (Daddy’s favorite).  You can see what we value in this house- Garbage, Football, and Family.  That’s right…

Here’s Claire out our front window.  Sometimes the Garbage Man even waves.  That’s a special treat.

And here is a blast from the past, just over a year ago.  Claire and Katelyn were checkin’ out some Ohioan garbage action out the Milmore’s front window.  Look how small Claire was.  They grow up so fast <sigh>.