Where’s Mr Papa?
January 13, 2009
Okay, time for one of these posts again as its been a while since I have posted. The New Year has kept me hopping both at work and at home.
On the home front, over the holidays and to a lesser extent afterwards, we have had renewed energy on family game night. During the holidays, we wrote down a lot of the games we wanted to play and threw them in a hat (okay, urn). We would randomly draw which game to play. We were playing one or two games a day. Very much fun. Since the holidays, we have been playing on the weekends and usually once during the week. Fun times!
On New Years Eve, my friend and I released the next major version of the Simple:Press Forum plugin for WordPress that we develop. Its open source software provided for free to the community. Many, many man months of effort went into this major release. Its been a fun time doing the development, but with a release comes the flood of support requests and the occasional bug that slipped through our testing. Answering those questions and squashing the bugs has had me busy at night. They have slowed down somewhat now, so we can begin thinking on what we want to add to the software next.
I have also been doing a bunch of contemplating about work. A lot of the activities that I have been doing for the last few years either wound down at the end of last year or will be finished in the first quarter. I have been in essentially the same job for a while now, so I figured it was time to see what else there was out there. I don’t mean at a new company, but within my current company.
Luckily, there was quite a few opportunities and folks that were anxious for me to come work with them. It was a tough decision though and I took my time meeting with them and the respective VPs in the organization. Today, I finally announced that I was moving on to another job in a different organization. Like I said, it’s still with the same company and even in the same business unit, just a different organization within it. I have spent around 15 or 16 years out of my 22 years with the company in the same organization. It will be tough to leave, but the timing seems right and the opportunity certainly is. I will continue to support them a little bit in my new job too. Unfortunately, there is no increase in pay 
So, with that decision behind me, I can now concentrate on bigger and better things, like this blog!
Christmas Fun
December 26, 2008
Well, another Christmas has come and gone, though it joyfully continues to linger in the household. Mr Papa’s World celebrated another great Christmas.
It started a bit more than a week ago when Suzanne’s parents came to town for a visit. They timed the visit so they could be home for Christmas, but more importantly so they could see a couple of performances by Suzanne and the kids. Unfortunately, except for the weekend, I was working most of the time having just taken three weeks off for our recent Transatlantic cruise.
They got to see several Christmas programs of the kids at school, the kids’ Holiday Dance Recital at their dance studio, and Suzanne’s holiday show at a retirement community in Tucson. In addition, on Saturday, I cooked up an early Christmas meal (Turkey and the trimmings) for the group as we celebrated an early Christmas with gift exchanges. It was a wonderful visit.
On Christmas eve we spent some family time watching a couple of movies and getting ready for the big day. I cooked our traditional Prime Rib Dinner for Christmas eve. We usually attend Christmas mass on Christmas Eve. In the past, Christmas Eve mass has been at 6:00 pm which has made scheduling a bit difficult. With a new priest this year, mass moved to 7:00 pm which is actually better for us. We were able to enjoy our Christmas Eve dinner (the Prime Rib turned out perfect once again) around 5:00, go to mass, and return home about 8:30 for our traditional exchange of family gifts, minus the ones we did early with Suzanne’s parents.
My big gift I received this year was a smoker. I am anxious to try it out and will be doing so today as I smoke some ribs, chicken and a pork roast. I will update everyone in another post on how that comes out. I am excited to try a new area of cooking that I haven’t dabbled much except an occasional effort on the grill with some wood chips. Yesterday, I started the curing/marinading process of the meat.
It was after midnight before we got to bed on Christmas Eve as we enjoyed our glasses of champagne. Luckily for us, the kids have not traditionally been early risers on Christmas morning. I remember bugging my parents to get up quite early some years. It was a bit after 7:30 when we finally were awakened in the morning by Savannah.
Its also been a family tradition that the kids sleep in our room with us on Christmas Eve. It was a lot easier when they were smaller! The tradition started because of how our house is laid out with the kids rooms on the opposite side of the house from our room. We didn’t want them coming to our room in the morning and passing by the Christmas tree where they could see if Santa came or not. That was always Mr Papa’s job in the morning to go take a look and get the answer and fire up the Christmas lights. So, the family sleeping together tradition continues except now we tend to bring in a couple of extra mattresses.
Christmas morning, as our family tradition goes, is spent opening the gifts for the kids from Santa. It remains a great family experience. The latter part of the morning is spent doing any assembly required work on the gifts. We also watched It’s a Wonderful Life together.
I had planned to do my smoking on Christmas day as another big feast, but my smoker had been scheduled to arrive on the 23rd, but didn’t arrive until Christmas Eve. So, I instead did my smoker assembly and seasoning on Christmas day and we had left overs to eat. The big feast will be tonight as mentioned previously.
Today will be spent playing with the new games and enjoying some of the new Blu Ray movies the kids received.
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