New Years Eve-ish

Sara prepared an awesome tapas dinner for New Years Eve. The kids ate while Doug drove to Whitetail from a week in McLean.

Tapas for dinner on New Year's Eve

After dinner, the gang played Beanboozled. You spin and pick a jelly bean. The flavor is either good or really bad. As you can see below, Julia is gulping water after eating a bad bean. The entire half of the room smelled like rotten eggs, stink buygs, etc. Apparently the bad ones were really bad. Doug was glad that he was on a no-sugar diet.

Beanboozled

After dinner we rang in the New Year a bit early (10pm) with a incredible fireworks display over the 7 ponds. Sara zoomed with friends past midnight. Doug passed out a 11pm.

Christmas 2020

We didn't get to travel, so we had a stay-near-home Christmas. Kids and Sara took a day off from skiing, we did zoom calls with Sara's family, and Grandad Johnson came down from Baltimore to watch us build our new Lego sets.

RJ open his Lego Freight Train Set

Julia was super excited about her gingerbread house Lego, her new doll, her katchup shirt. But the highlight was a 3-foot massive stuffed unicorn that was named "Uni."

Julia super excited about her huge unicorn

We delivered some cookies (that we could not eat: Sara - no gluten, no dairy; RJ - no nuts; Doug - no gluten, no sugar) to neighbors.

Julia and I posed in front of the "Christmas Night Fever" at the Gray's house.

Sara optimistically thought that we could have a nice family photo. After about 10-15 minutes, we ended up with what you see below. Julia is happy because she got to press the picture button.

Family poses for pre-online-church photo

Pre-Christmas at Grandad's

Since Aunt Debbie had to work, we had an early Christmas at Grandad's house in Baltimore. We played games, opened presents, stayed warm in front of the fire, and hung out with Walter.

Walter wears his UPS hat

Schlage comes through

 The lock from our garage to our house magically stopped shutting when you pushed the door closed. The only way to close the door was to manually turn the door knob while closing the door.

After taking the lock apart and doing some online research, Doug determined that the issue was a faulty tubular latch. 

I emailed the folks at Schlage and they sent me a new barrel latch within a week. Nice! Figured that type of service was a worth a blog post.

Replacing the tubular latch fixed the door closing problem!

Kids Christmas Break

During Christmas break, Sara took the kids to Whitetail for a ski-a-thon. The gang skied 11 days in some pretty good (a some pretty bad) conditions. For the first few days they hung out with Carter and Caleb as well as some of the other kids from the neighborhood.

Ski pack heads out

RJ was pretty excited about skiing over jumps formed at the edges of the runs. Jib-junction was a run that included some sanctioned jumps. 

After Christmas, Abby got to use her new ski equipment.

Manmade snow at Whitetail

The snow machines were active this week. With a high temp of 55 degrees, the workers were gone so we got to play.

RJ and Carter did a two-man bobsled run!

Julia and Caleb made snowballs and enjoyed sledding

Breaking the Rules

 Every once in a while a person must rebel. While in an office building with 2-3 other people, I felt the need to express myself.

In addition to walking the wrong way and entering through the wrong door ... I went down the up staircase.

Head Scratchers

I have two favorite Covid-19 office additions.

1. Foot grabber on bottom of the bathroom door. I like this one because they went through the expense of installing it so people didn't have to touch the door handle. However, unless you are a ninja, you cannot open the door by pulling with your foot ... because you have to push the handle down to unlatch the door.
2. On the 2 sets of double doors at the front entrance (picture 1 above), there are 2 doors assigned to walk in and 2 doors to walk out. I like this because right next to this entrance there is a double door (that everybody entering from the parking lot uses - which is everybody) without such restrictions.