New Year

Stardate 57010.4 (01-04-2004)

New Years Eve was fun. We have not been to a party in many years. Rachel was on Captain Carl's case, though. She desperately wanted to stump him on something. Brady spent about a half and hour showing me his new toy, a combination cell phone/PDA running Windows CE. It's a pretty cool gadget, but I don't know what I do with it. I'd be on the phone and wanting to check my calendar.

New Year's Day we went to see "The Return of the King". It was a good as all the raves I had read. They left out the romance between Eowyn and Faramir, and the part where Saruman takes over the Shire. I had fun because every time the army of Mordor was shown, Thomas sat up and began to shoot arrows or swing a sword. I guess he is pretending to be Legolas. One thing neither the book or the film touches on is where Gimli and Legolas went after the Aragorn became king. The animated version shows them sailing away with Gandalf, Frodo, and the elves. This makes some sense. There are a couple of other things that bothered me, but that would be giving away the film to anyone who has not seen it or read the book. There were also things the film did better than the book.

Rachel's birthday party on Friday went well. She had five of her friends for a sleepover. April had them do picture frames, and they played games. April was a little surprised when the girls found Rachel's brothers swords and spent about an hour playing pirate. I guess six 7 and 8 year old girls running around with toy swords is not something most people would picture. We gave Patrick the soundtrack to "Pirates of the Caribbean" for his birthday, so they got to play to music. I took the boys to Nickelcade, where they spent most of the night playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Later that night we all watched "The Princess Diaries". Rachel had a lot of fun.

My brother Verne has stopped by on his way back to Indianapolis from San Francisco.  He has now retired from United Airlines. He is going to stay for Patrick's birthday party that we postponed from last week. He got our snow blower working again. It just had a bad case of gas, or bad gas from a can I had sitting around for a couple of years. Of course this means it won't snow again for a long time.

Patrick and Rachel start basketball in North Ogden in two weeks. I volunteered to be an assistant coach for Rachel. Patrick's practices are on Mondays at 6:30, which means we need to rush from Youth Religious Education that ends at 6 in Layton to North Ogden. I told the coach we would be late, but he said that was ok. I have not heard from Rachel's coach. I am hoping he will not have practices on Wednesdays on or after 6.

April is happy that her alma mater LSU won the BCS bowl. I actually got a chance to watch the two NFL playoff games on Saturday. I didn't have any favorites with these, but I was glad Dallas lost. The KC Chiefs play next week.

I was surprised tonight on visiting Mike Gibby's site. He made a resolution to update his logs more frequently, and there were three new entries. He's  found a girl, so his life is looking up. One of my resolutions is to get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated. I am getting a large pile of old electronic stuff. You're not supposed to throw it out, but the only other option I have found is to pay some recycling outfit to come and get it. Since they will get more money out of it, I am not happy about that option.

Tomorrow the kids go back to school, and I go back to work, and life gets back to some kind of normal. New episodes of Enterprise start in a week and a half.

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