Hanukkah, a wonderful holiday!

I had a very pleasant day today celebrating Hanukkah with Jason's family. The day was filled with delicious food, great conversation, beautiful presents, and very lovely people that I'm happy to have in my life.

Thank you Jan, David, and Judy for my wonderful gifts and great company and conversation, Stephanie and John for hosting in your beautiful home and Jackson for being so darn cute. Happy Hanukkah to all!!

Dinner, Annie, and Friends

We are invited to see Jan, Jason's mom, in a musical theatre performance every year. It's part of the Goddard Space Flight Center, which is where her boyfriend, David, works. This year they put on Annie and it was the best show we've ever seen the community theatre group do. I've always been a huge fan of the movie as a child and as an adult, so I was hoping to enjoy it. They always provide a nice dinner before the show and again the dinner was the best they've ever offered. We also got to hang out with Stephanie and John all evening, which we don't do enough. It was great to see them and check up. All together everything was great and very entertaining. I really liked all the kids who performed in the show. To have or to be a talented brave kid like these were must be a wonderful thing. I wish I had had such talent growing up. I of course was too shy to even read out loud in class. I hope if and when I become a teacher I will somehow show my students that being self-conscience your whole life is no way to live. Anyways the show and dinner tonight were splendid. Jan, thanks for the tickets. You put a fabulous performance on as one of the Boylan Sisters and as part of the ensemble.

My Sister, The Mother

We got to spend time with my Dad, Stepmom, Sister and Nephew this weekend, which was a really nice break from...not spending time with them. Watching my sister with my nephew Jackson I'm so impressed at how successfully she's transitioned into motherhood. It just seems natural for her. Jackson hasn't made things easy for her and John but they've handled everything in stride and probably come out as stronger, better parents for it.

Jackson is a lucky kid to have two such devoted parents, and a mom that obviously loves him more than this blog entry could ever capture. Keep up the good work, Bloom.

Love me some Hosting

I really enjoy throwing small parties at our house. Sunday we threw a brunch for Jae's mom for retiring from teaching. Steph, John, Jackson, Jan, David, and Judy came over. Just the right amount of people. I made roasted potatoes with onion and peppers and I made banana pudding from scratch. All the food was great and everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. I like being the host. Especially cause you can drink all you want and just pass out when everyone leaves without having to decide who drives. And that's exactly what we ended up doing. We had mimosa's, Bloody Mary's, and Southsides for the drinkers to enjoy. I love brunch food and beverages. Jackson was as cute as ever. It was a blast and I can't wait for the next party. Bring it on!

Catching Up with Friends, Indirectly

My cousin James and his wife Amy (it's probably more appropriate to say Amy and my cousin James... James: "I'm helping!") have been maintaining a blog ever since their son Caleb was born about seven months ago. The time between their posts ranges from days to weeks (or minutes, in the case of their last giant blogsplotion of babies, bridges, bread and beaches), but they keep up with it consistently, and I'm always glad when I see a new post from them pop up in my Blogger Dashboard. I love the micro-publishing world for just this reason. It makes it so easy to keep up with people, at least indirectly, when you don't talk to them in person often enough. Here's their blog address if any of you are interested:

http://theajduo.blogspot.com

I mean this truly. I know more about life at the AJ Duo Fortress of Familyhood than I do about the lives of many other people that I see in person on a consistent basis. Blogging allows you to grant media-rich peaks into your daily life to many other people at once. My sister and brother-in-law's site for my nephew Jackson is another good example, which I've mentioned in previous blog posts. I don't see the three of them nearly often enough. There's the phone, of course. But the Jackson blog gives a much deeper picture of his life and those of his foot servants than a quick phone conversation can share.

I think personal blogs are a great addition to the paraphernalia of modern life. Along with Twitter, they represent the best in indirect personal communications, and I'd love to see more people I know start their own blogs. I can tell you that, after this year long experiment is over, Kate and I will start maintaining a smaller-scale blog to share our lives with our friends and family.

Photo Sharing

Online photo sharing is one of those novelties of modern life I think many of us take for granted. I was just going through pictures from my brother-in-law John's recent trip to Holland and Italy (there are some great shots there, John, by the way) and it got me thinking about my picture taking experiences in Europe back in 2001. I was on the continent for three and a half weeks, starting in Copenhagen, Denmark, making stops in Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, and Seville, ending finally in Grenada, Spain, taking the continent from top to bottom.

Needless to say I took a ton of pictures. I thought. By my standards of the day, using an old film-based SLR. I probably shot 16 or 17 rolls of film, which was all I could afford. At 24 exposures per roll I guess I shot somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 pictures. A gargantuan amount for me at the time, pitiful by digital standards. For comparison, Kate and I recently spent a week in Sedona, Arizona, and we easily shot five times as many pictures in less than a third of the time.

But at the time 400 pictures was a lot. There was the initial film costs to consider and then the developing, which, for 400 pictures was a lot more than I wanted to spend. I bought a couple physical albums as well, and spent days organizing my prints, placing and labeling them in the albums to save from forgetting names and places. That way I'd both have the photos for years and would be able to easily (again, easy by the standards of the day) share my photos with friends and family.

What a lengthy, arduous process! Which is why I say that online photo sharing is a real boon to shutterbugs everywhere. The difference in process is like night and day, and it's fascinating how, in probably less than five or six years, photography has radically shifted.

Now Kate and I, and the rest of the free world, take thousands of free pictures with our digital cameras, no developing required, and with a few simple keystrokes upload them so that everyone we know can see them, share them with other friends, and get prints made for themselves if they wanted. Imagine what I would have had to do eight years ago to get a print made for a friend: Take my albums to them, let them pick out the image they wanted, find the negatives, take them to a photo shop, get the print made, pick it up, and then either mail it or hand deliver the final image. Lots of steps. Lots of time. Needless to say I'm the only one that has copies of my Europe pictures.

But already multiple people have images from our Arizona trip. Most were gifts from us, but one or two ordered them from our online share site. I think that's so cool. Even the gift prints were easier to procure than they've ever been. Log on, pick the shots, order the sizes. Done. What's great about digital photography is the magic of waste. With nearly limitless potential for free shots, you can snap away with abandon. The more pictures you take, the more likely you'll wind up with some really nice shots, some of which you might not have taken if you were rationing film-based pictures, like I did in Europe. And then, unlike with film, at least consumer film, you can "develop" only the images you really want, instead of the entire roll.

And then share them as far and as wide as possible. There can never be too much good photography in the world.

Jackson at Two Months

Well, nearly two months. You all remember Jackson, my new-to-the-planet nephew. I was just looking over his website, and I couldn't think of a more positive thing to share tonight.

Jackson, thanks to his parents, is such an endearing little guy. They've done such a great job capturing his essence in his online presence. The writing demonstrates a deep understanding of someone who until very recently...wasn't. It's amazing to me how fast parents and kids bond.

My favorite part of the site is the photos. The shots of my sister and Jackson get me in a way I've never really experienced. They just seem...right. Almost as if Jackson's always been there, pressed up against Steph's cheek, wide-eyed and dazzled by the world, and it's just taken all of us 32 years to notice him.

I'm not going to say a lot tonight. I'm going to let Jackson carry this entry. Here's Jackson, as penned by Jackson.

http://www.ourbabybird.com/

Uncle Jason

My sister Stephanie and brother-in-law John are due to give birth to her first child about a month from tomorrow, which would make me, for the first time in my life, an uncle.  It hadn't really hit me until today, the day before Steph's baby shower, how close it is, and how cool it's going to be.

I can't wait to meet Baby Bird (that's what Steph and John are calling her because they don't know the sex) for the first time.  Meet her for real.  I met her once in a dream I had a few months ago, but in the dream she was a seven year old African American girl named Latifah.  I hold this up as an example of the uncanny predictive powers of dreams.

Kate's nephews also call me Uncle Jason, but this will be the first time a blood relative will be able to use that name.  And I've been thinking about what kind of uncle I'll be.  Off the bat, I know I'll be the uncle that makes coins vanish, and then miraculously reappear from Baby Bird's ears.  Over and over again.  I remember my Uncle Gary that way, and I've always wanted to play that role.  And I'm sure later in life I'll be the uncle that cracks goofy jokes all the time.  Jokes that he thinks are funny but are completely lost on Baby Bird...mainly because they aren't actually funny.

Ultimately I hope I can be the kind of uncle that, once Latifah has grown up and become her own person, she'll remember, think is still cool even though he's a crotchety old man, and have fond memories of.  Gad, I'm talking as if I'll be dead...

What I want it to be cool, funny uncle Jason.  The uncle that Latifah would want to be when she grows up if it weren't biologically impossible for to do so.

Tea Please

I so enjoy a hot or cold cup of tea. It's the perfect caffeinated beverage, I probably average 5 cups of tea a day. My favorite present this holiday was a single cup tea brewer from Stephanie and John, Jason's sister and brother-in-law. They sell them at Teavana (the Mecca of all Tea Shops). I say that even though I've only ventured in there once. After I got the brewer I needed more loose tea options, so I went in and was immediately enthralled by all the tea selections. I am also a big fan of honey in my tea. I don't do sugar or cream anymore. I can also do a nice flavored tea by itself sometimes. Jasmine is one my favorites. Currently I'm into the loose Samurai Chai from Teavana. It's considered a mate, which gives you a nice balanced high without any of the jitters. It's been pretty good to me at work lately. I am also real into white and green teas, and I think the next kind I'm going to try is an Oolong tea. These teas are really good for you. Some are known to lower your cholestrol, help burn calories,and a lot contain antioxidants and great minerals and vitamins. Anyway, tea is great and I enjoy consuming it everyday. Oh, Oh have I mentioned the scents, the aromas are intoxicating. Good gift for Kate... loose tea and honey.