The Past Weekend
March 12, 2007
Whew, what a busy weekend – or at least it seemed like it. I thought I had finally put all of Suzanne’s vacation questions/issues to bed for the upcoming Alaskan cruise on the Celebrity Mercury. We booked our airfare, hotel and transfers to and from the cruise ship. We booked our excursions for the cruise. What else could be left?
Suzanne is very anal on planning of vacations. She spends hours and hours – wait, make that weeks and weeks of time doing research for our vacations. I don’t mean that in a bad way because we are better prepared for these vacations than anyone else I know. Plus, I don’t have to do the research and she really loves and thrives on it. It’s just that I don’t really know what I am going to pack in which suitcase for a vacation that is still 3 months away. This weekend, I had to spend time with her and the kids and plan out the activities when we arrive and Vancouver and then after the cruise before we fly out the next day. Sometimes I would love to just take a vacation and wing it – or maybe relax and not do something every second. That’s where cruising works out wonderfully. Time on the ship is your time. If we took a land vacation, I would need to go back to work to recover from all the vacation activities. Again, I really do like that she does this, but it can be a bit overbearing at times.
She also took care of all the airfare, hotel and transfers for all of my family for this family reunion cruise. As most of my readers probably know, we also run a cruising blog over at Cruise Talk. I keep trying to get her more interested in doing cruising stuff over there, but her interest appears limited. It would be really easy to adapt the site to include travel agent type services. I have offered to set it up and such and to get her accreditation. Quite frankly, I was a bit surprised that she hasn’t been more interested in it. I guess she likes planning out her own vacations more 
I also found time this weekend to work on some of my in project websites that I am developing. I hope to wrap up the newly designed 158th site for my America’s Army clan in the next couple of weeks. I am moving it away from it’s current CMS and moving to WordPress like this site. It’s been an interesting voyage with lots of learning. I am amazed at how much I have learned writing a bunch of plugins to do things that I needed on the old site. I should have a preview available soon.
Sean and I also dug out an old Civil War boardgame that we hadn’t played in a while. The game is Battle Cry. It’s a very war/strategy game that doesn’t take hours to play. The game is labeled as intermediate level difficulty which is good for Sean since he is still learning military tactical games. I guess he is learning well because he totally dusted me in our recreation of Bull Run. We have several more grandiose scale games, but usually find it hard to devote the 3 or 4 hours it takes to play them.
The family also got together for a family movie night on Saturday. We watched Mission Impossible III. We don’t go to the movies very often and just choose to wait for them to come out on DVD. I actually enjoyed this movie, certainly more than the first two movies. While still far fetched, it seemed to tone down the unrealism substantially from the previous two and managed to hold my interest throughout the movie.
Suzanne and the kids get a week off from dancing this week, so the whole family will be home each night this week. That’s a rarity for us.
Savannah’s Birthday
January 15, 2007
Tomorrow is Savannah’s 9th birthday. She is excited and been planning all sorts of stuff for her Birthday.
This weekend, I allowed her to plan the menu for Sunday to count for her Birthday dinner. Boy, she went to town and planned a 5 course dinner. For an appetizer, she had me make her Scampi al Forno. She loves seafood and shrimp is one of her favorites, right behind escargot. I guess if you love shrimp, who wouldn’t love is smothered in a garlic, lemon, and olive oil sauce?
She also love soups, especially my homemade ones. She decided she wanted a consommé, but couldn’t decide between a beef or chicken consommé, so she asked if I could make a mixed one. Well, not being one to disappoint her, I told her I would make a consommé supreme, and make it a combination of beef, chicken, turkey, pork and veggies. It came out quite nice.
For her salad course, she wanted a ceasar salad complete with homemade croûtons and dressing, with large pieces of bacon. Again, I didn’t disappoint her. She also found a swiss recipe for a braided farm bread that she wanted me to make so she could have bread with every course.
For the main course, she selected an oven roasted chicken breast. She really loves my special breading I do for the chicken and how its roasted in the oven though there is plenty of butter to make it just like fried chicken. For dessert, we had a Western lemon poppy seed cake.
With all those courses, we were quite stuffed by the end of the day. With me doing NutriSystem and not used to all that rich food, my stomach was gurgling away all night long with multiple trips to the restroom. I just cant handle that kind of food in large quantities anymore. That is a good thing…
We also pretty much finished up her Birthday gift this weekend. We compile all the money from grandparents and us as she wanted to completely redecorate her room. She went with some strange stuff in my opinion, but her and Suzanne are quite happy with the results. I guess I wouldn’t have paired up animal skins with pink walls (already that color). Again, she is happy, so all is good.
Her other big thing for her Birthday will be a return trip to Kartchner Caverns next weekend. We have yet to see the Big room there as its only open part of the year. Since going there over the Fourth of July weekend, she has wanted to go back and see the Big Room. It should be a fun day as this Arizona State Park is quite fascinating.
My Birthday is only two weeks after hers…
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