Vacation Update
December 17, 2007
Vacation continues to go nicely. I really needed some time off. The last part of the year at work was rough. I still haven’t decided if I am going to go back to work on the 2nd of January or delay until the 7th. I had been thinking the 2nd, but the kids are trying to get me to make it the 7th since they have that whole week off from school.
On Saturday, Suzanne and the kids had their annual Christmas dance recital with the Alma Dolores International Dance Centre. This tends to be the biggest production of the year. Unfortunately, its also the performance with the most little kids. One can only take so many 4 and 5 year olds up on stage trying to dance. Don’t get me wrong, we were there with our kids too, so I fully understand the families and how they like it. I just wish they didn’t cut out a large portion of the older kids and adults from this recital.
All that said, this recital was the most crowded that I have seen yet. Almost the entire theater was jammed pack and some folks had to stand up for the show. When the first act ended, it cleared out somewhat because most of the little kids had to go home for bed. Sean and Savannah did very well in their dances and had a great time. Suzanne didn’t actually dance in this recital, but as the pom pom teacher and song and dance teacher at the dance studio, she had several numbers in the show. Her pom pom class continues to be popular and growing in size. In fact, its too big and there was too many kids on the stage at once. They still looked pretty good, but if you have 50 girls on stage, at their age, there is no way to keep them all in time. After the first of the year, she will be breaking the pom pom class into two classes to keep the size more manageable.
The kids have finally won us over and sometime this coming week we will likely be getting them cell phones. We have wanted to wait until they are old enough, but will all of our activities, there are times that we give them one of ours so we know where everyone is and what they are doing. It is just making sense to get them a phone. There will obviously be some strict rules on when they can and can’t use them. It will cost $10 a month apiece to add them to our current plan. For a normal month, they will pay us half the bill out of their chore earnings. If they are particularly bad in a month, they will foot the whole bill. If they should happen to have an outstanding month, we will pick up the whole month tab. Hopefully, this cost / sharing type of arrangement will help them be responsible. It doesn’t hurt that I want to get myself a new phone too – probably one of those LG Voyagers.
We had a nice sight in our yard today as the local herd of antelope when strolling by our house. The herd size is definitely up this year, which is good. Enjoy the prong horn antelope images below. They were taken from our back porch.
Merry Christmas From DirecTV
December 14, 2007
We got a nice little Christmas present from DirecTV last night. They have begun to broadcast our local TV stations in High Definition. This is a big deal for us because we don’t watch very many TV shows if they are in standard definition any more. It’s just not as enjoyable.
Living in the country, we actually get our local stations from Tucson, AZ, the largest city in our vicinity. Tucson is considered a small market for television. It took a long time for them just to get DirecTV to carry their local stations. When DirecTV recently launched a bunch of satellites in preparation for many, many more HD channels, they also planned to start converting the non-local HD channels to HD. Again, Tucson would not be on the early list.
When the satellites went operational a month or two ago, we were hopeful that we would be a year or so away from getting our locals in HD. Now, we have been able to get waivers for all channels but NBC and thus get the HD “locals” from Los Angeles. However, the timing is not always convenient and its not local programming.
We were pleasantly surprised last night to already see that they had turned on our local channels in HD. Now we can start watching NBC again. Is there anything any good on NBC? We can also save a few bucks and cancel our National network feeds since they will be largely duplicated for prime time programming.
Thanks DirecTV! And Merry Christmas to you too!
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