I figured that when summer was over all our activities would cool down, and I could get back to writing blog posts every other day. Right.

October is just full of releases, birthdays, birthday parties, biking and Halloween strolls, Halloween parties, and Halloween night. My children’s birthdays are both in October, two weeks apart. We couldn’t possibly be organized enough to actually have the birthday parties near the birthdays. And, now that the kids are older and have their own friends, we actually have to throw two parties. So, not only do we celebrate each birthday on the birthday, going out for dinner and opening presents, but we have to throw two separate parties.

Then there is Halloween. I remember Halloween in my childhood being a one night event. There was a little preparation ahead of time getting the costume ready and such. Now there are town Halloween events, company events, and parties. This year we went to the Hudson event, but skipped the Marlborough one. We also went to my company’s party. Both of those were jam-packed with kids, waiting waiting waiting in line to play games, get candy, etc. etc. Then of course there is Halloween night. Erica took the kids out, I stayed at home and manned the door.

On the biking front, I am still trying to bike daily to work. I’m getting all my winter-wear ready, and my headlight charged for next week (post-daylight savings). I’ve even taken the smoothy tires off my mountain bike and put, gasp, mountain bike tires on. There is a big difference between my 700×23 road tires and my 26×2.1 mountain bike knobbies.

This past weekend I got a chance to climb Wachusett Mountain again with my friend Sanjay. At the beginning of the season he was riding a mountain bike, and our first ride we couldn’t even get around the reservoir. Since then, he’s found himself a road bike, gotten owned by Nashbar, done the Middlesex Century and now climbed the highest point in Massachusetts east of the Connecticut river. Way to go Sanjay!

Last weekend during my son’s nap time I had the occasion to spend some quality time with my daughter. I asked her what she wanted to do, and she wanted to draw. I said fine – but with some rules. I said we should make a comic strip. She wasn’t familiar with the concept, so we each made one. We drew little boxes to put our drawing in, and tried to tell a story from one box to the next. I couldn’t believe how well they came out – we read them to my wife and son (when he woke up) and they cracked up.

Here’s my daughter’s comic (I helped write out the captions, but she told me what to write):

And mine:

My Uncle Fred described the situation best:

My brother (and yours, or your uncle, father, husband, Brother, friend, etc) Steve, proved once again that there are only two kinds of motorcyclists: those who have gone down and those who will. He “high-sided” when braking to avoid stopped traffic on the NYS Thruway. The accident happened during the morning rush hour yesterday, June 19.

Steve does not recall most of the details except that he believes he hit the pavement at about 50 mph. He was wearing full body armor and a full-face (modular/flip-up) helmet. He suffered no “road rash.” His injuries were limited to impact related trauma: two broken ribs, a fractured clavicle (collar bone), a bruised spleen that required surgery but did not have to be removed, and a collapsed lung that was quickly treated and now seems to be functioning normally.

Steve was able to avoid more serious injury, possibly inflicted by passing traffic, due to the extraordinary kindness of a fellow biker: Kevin from NJ. He was on his Goldwing a few hundred yards behind Steve and saw the accident. He immediately pulled over, directed traffic away from Steve and his downed bike, and along with another (unknown) good Samaritan in a black pick-up, summoned State Troopers, provided them with an eye-witness account, and remained on scene until the ambulance had arrived.

Steve is resting comfortably in Surgical ICU at Nyack Hospital and the physicians appear to be pleased with his progress. The prognosis is for a full and complete recovery — it will just take several weeks or so.

My father’s accident happened this past Tuesday, while my family and I were visiting our cousins up in the cell-phone-signal troubled Adirondack mountains. We kept in touch with my mom and the hospital, and did not change our plans.

My mother was not able to make it up to the mountains, but we met in Syracuse on Friday to meet up with more cousins. We had my Grandmother’s memorial service today in Skaneateles. The weather was beautiful, the service was beautiful, and there was even a ladybug on the minister’s robe – I think Grandma was watching us and enjoyed the show. I had been practicing the closing music on my guitar for a few weeks now, and it came out great with all of our family singing, including my kids.

This past week has been a non-stop whirlwind of events. My dad is expected to be in the ICU for probably another week, monitoring his spleen and lungs, and also maybe operating on his shoulder. Then he’ll spend a few more weeks in the physical therapy center. We’ll be packing up and driving back to Massachusetts tomorrow, and then a whirl-wind week at work trying to get a project released (I haven’t checked in, so I just assume everything is hunky dorey, heh heh). Then the family packs up the car again for a whirl-wind camping trip up to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I was only able to get out twice so far on my bike, 20 miles in the mountains and 30 miles in Syracuse. Still keeping up my 17mph average even with all the mountain/hill climbs.

My grandmother passed away yesterday, she was 95 years old. I spoke to her on the phone the day before, and told her about how I loved coming over to their house when I was a child. Grandpa used to make poached eggs on toast, and they would cut them up into little squares. They had a little corner of a bookshelf where they had a collection of toys for me.

I spent a good deal of time with my grandparents when I was growing up. They lived very close, and my parents would frequently drop me off there, or they would come and stay with me at our house. In fact, our house was the house that my mother grew up in. We moved apart in 1989, we moved to near New York City, my grandparents moved to Napa, CA.

Both of my grandparents got to meet my wife, although my grandfather died 10 years ago just before we were married. My grandmother was alive to see both of her great-grandchildren. I remember hearing about how after our first visit with our first child, she refused to have her sliding glass door cleaned because it had our daughter’s hand print on it.

We will all miss you Grandma.

Esther Scriven, November 11th 1911 – April 1st 2007.

My buddy Google Reader sent me these great links today:

• Jon’s Blog: The Four Best Ways to Sit at Your Computer
  I’ve been thinking about bringing a yoga ball to work to sit on, except all my friends will make fun of me even more. You guys suck chat.
• CNET News.com: Gates keeps close eye on kids’ computer time
  My wife and I limit how much TV and computer time our kids get. We try to keep the TV between 30 and 60 minutes a day. Computer is usually about an hour a week for our older, nothing for the younger. Truthfully, we only let them watch that much TV because we need to get stuff done dangit! And when the TV is on they are focused on it, and not pouring out the legos and mixing them with playdough.

My son woke me up several times last night. Around 6:30 this morning he just wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up to make him some breakfast. Before I could have my morning tea he decided that he needed to tell me a few things. I set up the recorder so that I could share my caffeine-less conversation with my 2 year old(s). He did most of the talking.

We had a fantastic President’s day weekend – definitely nice to have that extra day. On Saturday we went to our church’s pot-luck, on Sunday was church and naps, and on Monday we went roller skating with Rachel and the kids. All of the kids started off pretty shaky, but by the end they were doing amazingly well. Especially my son, who ended up falling asleep on his Aunt even with all the crowd noise and loud music.

This weekend was a little over the top with birthday parties, and I only saw half of them. Friday afternoon there was one at our friend’s house, then the kids schlepped over to the mall for a build-a-bear party. I caught the trail end of that, showing up just after work. Saturday was fairly low-key, no party until 6pm – but it was at Teamworks, the local in-door sports place. The kids were crazy, running around for an hour, then pizza, screaming, cake and more screaming. Today was the last party, after church we ran back to the mall for another build-a-bear. My daughter managed to score two bears this weekend. I felt bad for my son, so at Job Lots I got him this awesome, uh, thing. It is kind of a frog with bad teeth and a helmet and goggles. He is kind of a back-pack, and makes this awesome noise.

In December I did a self-cleansing. This second week in January I did a pre-spring house cleaning – about 2 years overdue.

Our house was almost unlivable. Around 2 years ago we had some guests over, so we cleaned up – stashing everything in our master bedroom. This remained the “storage” room for the past 2 years. About 1 year ago we shuffled around our upstairs bedrooms, moving out of one so that each of our kids could have their own rooms. This left my wife and I the living room. We set up on the futon, and have been staying there until last week.

So, to realize my New Year’s resolution, I spent about 10-12 hours each day, Monday through Saturday (6 days), working on cleaning out our house. I sorted out about 14 large contractor bags full of clothing, 6 bags of paper recycle, 4 bags of garbage, and 3 bags of toys/knick knacks.

We still have more work to do, but our house is now livable and presentable – we actually had some friends over for dinner! Our main task now will be to keep up, and slowly continue sorting and organizing.

So, I went through the Clutter Hoarding Scale from the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, here are the results:

It’s January 6th, 68 degrees outside in New England, what shall we do? Shall we think about greenhouse gases, the polar ice caps melting, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, heat waves, tornadoes and hurricanes (more about global warming at wikipedia)? An Inconvenient Truth is next on my netflix queue, but I managed to put all this aside, and go for a bike ride! Whoo hoo!

I biked from Marlborough to Maynard to meet up with Bill and Ken. We did a 14 mile cut of Bill’s century ride, basically the beginning and end chopped together. Together we averaged probably about 14 mph, by myself I averaged 17. My total trip was 36.5 miles. My legs have got 4,567 miles on them since July 2005.

When I got home I found all three kids playing in the yard with our neighbors, so we and the neighbors all set out to go to our local playground. Apparently that was what everybody else was thinking too, because it was swamped! We had some good fun there, then headed out to Chuck E. Cheese for some barftastic pizza and partying. Chuck E. Cheese is what it is. First you get your tokens, then you play the games and go on rides, which in turn give you tickets. You put the tickets in a different machine which gives you a receipt voucher. You then trade that in for a plastic ring that looks like a bug. The kids had a great time. We thoroughly sterilized them when we got home.

I took tons of pictures as usual. I also got a few videos, one of this guy that looked like DJ Qualls leading the kids in some birthday dancing with the big scary mouse.

We had a very busy weekend with lots of driving, seeing family, eating, celebrating, eating, opening presents and eating.

It all started last Thursday. Took my daughter to go see “Happy Feet.” It gets my vote for most craptastic movie of the year. Even more craptastic than “Eragon.”

On Friday I drove both kids to Hartford to meet my mom. We had a nice lunch at the Corner Pug, then she took the kids to NY for a few days. That evening Erica and I went to see “Night at the Museum” at the Jordan’s Imax. It was awesome! My vote for un-craptastic movie of the year.

On Saturday we packed, wrapped and I even got a bike ride in. On Sunday morning we left for Long Island. We arrived for the party and had a great time. The last time I was at my Aunt’s house I got there by bike. After the party we went up to Nyack and prepared for the big day. Had a nice dinner, made a ginger bread house, and managed to get the kids to bed. After they went to sleep I got all the presents out of the car – enough to keep us unwrapping most of the morning.

On Christmas Monday, the kids woke up, saw the note from Santa and all the presents. Had a quick breakfast then opened all the gifts. The favorites were of course a barbie for my daughter, play doh for both, and a buzz lightyear for my son. We played all day.

On Tuesday we got packed, made a stop at the mall, then headed home. Lots of yucky traffic, ended up taking around 4 to 5 hours (usually 3).

If you want to see all the pictures go to BushelAndAPeck – requires a username and password, contact me for yours.

Oh, and, some info about Festivus at Wikipedia.