This morning they came in all excited because they pulled vitamins and happened to get a mary, a joseph, and a jesus. They could make a manger scene. And then eat it.

I’ve put the most work into the soccer related ones.

I missed a header on Sunday by about 2 feet (I had one cross go behind me and another that brought me and the goal together. I took my eye off the ball to make sure I didn’t kill the goalie, not sure I would have had a chance on it, but the goalie appreciated get knocked to the ground with no elbows or skulls involved). I also missed a long goal from outside the penalty box by the thinnest of margins, it went over the post (I also brutally shanked a long one too). I put a couple crosses in, neither of which went anywhere, and I had a nice fake while I was on the ball, but I passed out of it instead of dribbling (I stutter stepped and the defender bit, but I put the ball to the runner coming across the middle. He missed the shot.)

I played striker a bunch last week, which was new for me. I spent a lot of time not knowing where to go, but I got into it and started making good runs to clear up space for people and ended up on the end of a few crosses. It was fun, but my best position is on the defensive wings.

I’m pretty good at holding my own in one on one, I clog up space in the middle, and I can make runs up the flanks into space well. I score most of my goals on runs to the far post from the back line, as the defense switches over I slide in and take the pass. Last week I also stopped two shots as a fullback on the goal line, which was kind of cool. I shut down a couple of 2 on 1′s effectively (and got burned on three or four more, they were countering a lot and hard but I don’t worry to much about that: What are you going to do? Especially towards the end of the game when even if you stand them up the rest of the team is watching the play and doesn’t get back and they restart. That happened a lot. Combine that with a turnover plagued midfield and I wasn’t too worried about it.), and played well all around.

I’m getting closer. I need to practice more and the goals will start falling.

Kim and I went to see the United States Vs Venezuela on January 21st in Phoenix.

The game ended in the 97th minute on a corner kick (The picture above isn’t that corner, but an earlier one from the same spot).

We bought the tickets two hours before game time off of craigslist after a series of screw ups kept me from getting tickets earlier. But we made it!

I wasn’t sure what to expect, the game was mostly MLS players as European leagues were still going, and Venezuela isn’t a traditional powerhouse. But Jermaine Jones was playing and I do enjoy watching Jermaine Jones. He played a prototypical Jones kind of game, physical, relentless, and drew a wicked Yellow for slashing down a Venezuelan player at the Knees. He controlled mid field and ran circles around Venezuela.

We also got to see Brek Shea, who made some great runs early and then started losing the ball. Like everyone on the US team not named Clint Dempsey he needs to learn to finish. It was cool to get to see him play in person though.

I was a little disappointed Kyle Beckerman didn’t play (he was injured) but seeing Jones was a good trade off (I’ll probably get to see RSL play in february but I’m not thinking I’ll make many bundesliga games this year). It was a lot of fun.

And I want to remember this because it was funny but Kim tried to claim she was wearing paisley because it was the official fabric of the Venezuelan national team.

Here are the achievements for 2012:

Being Awesome (120)

Try a food challenge 10
Finish a Food challenge 20
Drink a 6 pack in a day 10
Let’s make it Brinner 5
Ride a mechanical Bull 50
Bar Hopper (5 bars in a night) 25

Writing (135)

Edit a chapter of starfish 10
Finish Editing Starfish 50
10k words in Nanowrimo 10
25k words in Nanowrimo 10
50k words in Nanowrimo 10
5 Blog Entries 10
25 Blog Entries 10
52 Blog Entries 25

Being a grown up (85)

Buy a Home Decoration 10
Order a cocktail like an adult 5
Go out to a fancy dinner all dressed up 20
Throw a party 50

Let’s Make Something! (25)

Make Scones 5
Grill a steak 10
Make Andrada Style BBQ ribs 10

SEE ALL THE THINGS! (45)

Watch a romcom with Kim 5
Watch 1st three Star Wars 10
Goto a movie dinner theater 10
See the Mad Max Trilogy 10
Watch the Romero trilogy 10

Soccer (175)

Score a hat trick 30
Score a header 20
Make an accurate pass with my head 10
Long Range Goal 10
Score on a volley 25
Beat a player on the dribble 10
Play Twice in one week 10
Howdy Stranger – Play a pick up game with people I’ve never met 25
Juggle 30 times 25
Assist on a cross 10

Things to do (330)

See the Rocky Horror Pictures Show 25
Go camping in a new place 25
Build a project with the girls 25
Run a 5k with Kyra 50
1/21/2012: Goto a proffessional Soccer game 10
5 Non Star bucks coffee shops 10
5 New Resturaunts 10
Try Peruvian food 10
Brew my own beer 50
Sleep in the Treehouse 10
Attend a cultural fair 10
See a concert 20
Do something nice for a stranger out of the blue 10
Take wife on a getaway 50
Play a game I’ve never played 5
Beat a Video game 10

Pay the bills (85)

Get a freelance gig 10
Make $1000 Freelancing 25
Buy a Mac 25
Submit an App to the store 25

This is easily my favorite picture in the world. It’s my phone background, and I’m going to print it and put it up on the wall, just too cute. But we didn’t use it for our christmas cards because I’m not in it.

You read that right! We are actually going to send Christmas Cards this year! Like adults! (Maybe, we made a mistake on the first printing and had to have them reprinted, so they’re not here yet so it’ll be touch and go. But it’s closer than ever before.) We took a bunch of pictures for the cards, and these are the one’s we didn’t use.

We couldn’t use the one below because Kim wasn’t in it. We thought about putting two pictures, one with me and the girls, one with kim in the girls, but decided that would look weird. We really need a tripod so we can get everybody in the frame at once. Or we need more people walking around the lake in the morning (We took them at the lake by our house because it was the most pastoral setting we could think of in walking distance).

The pictures turned out really good, but to see the one on the christmas cards you’ll have to wait until they get delivered. Or until we just post it here because writing out addresses is kind of a pain. Either way, you have to wait.

But first thing: If your camera uses SD cards for the love of god go buy an eye-fi. It’s $40 and you’ll never have to worry about getting pictures uploaded again. Our old camera (and our old eye-fi card) were stolen and everybody I tell says something along the lines of:

“The worst part is you lose all your memories” but I don’t! My memories download to my computer as soon as I walk in the door. And by the time I get upstairs I’m looking at them on flickr. The work I had to do for that? Turn on my camera.

And that was the old cards. The new cards, are frankly ridiculous. My new eye-fi card, if it decides it can’t find a network it knows about to connect and get my pictures out, will create it’s own adhoc network and wait for somebody to connect to it. There are official iOS and Android apps to do this. How this works, and how you set it up isn’t obvious. So I grabbed my camera and my phone and walked up the block until my wi-fi wasn’t in range (I could have just turned it off, but the story explaining why I didn’t is long and boring enough you’re better off just trusting that it was easier to get up and walk 50 yards).

Then I pulled out my camera and took a picture. Then I pulled out my phone, made sure it had wi-fi on, and opened the eye-fi app. A bit later the photo was on my phone. Magic.

Do I really want my camera battery to be running a wi-fi hotspot all the time? No, but the card doesn’t quite do that. If the eye-fi card sees that it has pictures to send it looks for a wifi network to send them on. If it can’t find one it waits N minutes (where N is configurable in the eye-fi tools) then starts up it’s hotspot. It will then wait for a connection for Y minutes then give up. That’s not too terrible, but since I really want this for vacations so I can dump my pictures onto my phone/ipad and get back to filling up my card I’m going to leave it off.

Irritatingly enough though you can’t turn direct mode on and off unless the card is plugged into your computer via USB. So it’s not something you can decide on a whim to do. On the balance I decided to leave it off unless I’m going somewhere I think it might be nice.

Another nice feature of the card is that endless memory: You can configure the card to clean itself up. I have it set to clean up pictures (that have been transferred to the computer) once it’s 50% full (That’s configurable. 50% is the default which seemed reasonable to me). With the old card I’d have to occasionally go in and clear the card out, which usually happen somewhere I was taking lots of pictures, so I had to do it manually to free up space right then and there. But now the card will take care of it for me.

Meanwhile the eye-fi app on iPhone will also push all of your phone camera pictures home too. I tested it out a little and it looks like you have to open the app and send them on, and it will only send pictures that were actually taken by the camera (instagram pic saved to camera roll didn’t transfer). So occasionaly I fire up the eye-fi app and all my pictures get sent to my computer and flickr. One less reason to ever have to sync my computer. I’m going to set that up on Kim’s phone because she’s terrible about synching her phone: The other day we finally synched it and there were almost 400 pictures to get transferred.

I’m very excited about this, all my pictures can just show up on flickr where I want them, and I don’t have to do hardly anything. And I don’t have to worry nearly so much about running out of space on memory cards. Worst case I can dump it onto my phone, regardless of local network conditions.

So we went to the Halloween store.

The entrance to the store is made up of six gallows with decomposing corpses hung from them, each of which wails and flails around. There’s an end cap made up entirely of dismembered body parts: hands, feet, heads in various states of agony, and other rubber viscera. There’s a giant display of zombie babies. Zombie babies whose eyes light up, whose heads spin around. Zombie babies eating brains, zombie babies eating feet. Zombie babies swinging on a trapeze (really). There are many different displays of mannequins that scare you: vampires that rise from graves, frankenstien, spiders, the girl from the exorcist whose head spins around. All of them have a button you push (or a pad to step on) that activates them.

There was an entire section of zombie themed animatronics. A remote control zombie torso that you could move around. Generic zombies looking (and acting) scary. And a man hung upside down in a net that screamed in terror labeled “zombie bait”.

All of this stuff life sized, towering over kyra and Zoe.

They loved it.

We pushed every button, ran away from everything, chased each other with the zombie torso, and looked at way too many zombie babies.

Zoe insisted it was all beautiful, kyra just thought it was awesome. Both of them would have stayed for hours.

They both know now that I like scary movies, zombie movies in particular, and the countdown to movie weekends is on.

Kyras postscript: I want to go to a haunted house someday very soon, like tomorrow.

So tonight I told them my idea and they were ready. Like: lets do this right now (one thing the girls are good at is decisive action). I didn’t have any idea how it would work, and was woefully u prepared, but I didn’t want to miss my shot. Sonwe ad-libbed a system and the concept was the dread pirates. Last year I wrote a novel for national novel writing month called the dread pirates, starring kyra and Zoe as pirates. In the book zoe was the greatest sword fighter in the world. I read parts of the book to the girls and they have bought in to the mythology.

So we start with the girls ship being approached by a ship intent on arresting them. The captain demands they surrender and I ask Zoe “what do you do?”

Her response: “I cut off his head.

Then his arms and waist. And his pants fall off because he has no waist. “

Me: “huh”

Zoe: “then I cut the rest of their heads off because I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world”

Kyra: “I start cutting heads off too!”

Now we break for a few minutes of viscous sword play and desperate brainstorming from me about how to salvage a plot.

Luckily Kim got home and I had to finish dinner. But the girls are excited to play pirates again.

It was a qualified success: me and the girls have a fun game to play, but Zoe is apparently a little blood thirsty. Although the greatest sword fighter in the world wouldn’t go meekly into the night, so at least she stayed in character.

But recently, every once in a while, kyra will do it. And everybody cracks up.

Kyras homage to Zoe.

It’s cute and the only thing I can think of that either of them does that’s at all nostalgic.