my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘family’ Category

I have told my family and friends, but I just want everyone to know that Valerie and I are getting married!

Both my kids have birthdays that fall close to the start of baseball season, so this year, I baked cupcakes for them and decorated them like baseballs.

We haven’t made it to a game yet, but I think that I’ll have a chance to take them to a game during the Bisons’ next home stand. I love watching Bisons games.

The cupcakes are made with yellow cake mix with vanilla frosting, and once I frosted them, I dipped them into a bowl of sweetened coconut flakes (which adhered to the frosting). Then I used a tube of red frosting to draw on the lacing so that they look like baseballs.

The trouble with all these cupcakes is that I like eating them. I gave up eating cheezborgors, but that’s easy to keep up, because there are no cheezborgors in my house, and I’ve got a half dozen leftover cupcakes sitting right there, kept fresh in their shiny zip-lock baggies…. Mmmm….

Timothy loves to play Othello, so we play just about every time he is at my house. I decided to create a video of a game, so here it is.

The music is from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The video is made up of 61 different photos taken with a digital camera mounted on a tripod, which I had aimed directly down at the game board.

The boys and I went sledding at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday, where we saw a sign that says the toboggan chutes are opening soon. I read in today’s paper (well, I read it on the newspaper’s web site) that the toboggan chutes will be open next week. I can’t wait to take the boys on that ride!

I was surprised to learn that the toboggan chutes have been closed for four years. It has been that long since we were there last? I am pretty sure my oldest son went down the chute with me, but that would have been five winters ago, and I am pretty sure he was too young back then.

Sledding with the boys is a lot of fun. I’m still young enough to go with them, and they’re not old to want to go without me, so it works out great. We crashed a few times (that’s part of the fun), and I managed to avoid landing on my bad shoulder. You know you’re old when you are thinking, as you fall from your sled, ‘I need to make sure I don’t land on my bad shoulder.’

We were dressed for cold and wind. My face mask stayed put, but the boys were wearing a different style of face mask, with a larger opening for the face, instead of the eye- and mouth-holes my hat has. They didn’t look scary at all.

Sledding at Chestnut Ridge Park reminds me of the sledding hill where we went when I was a kid. We used to walk through several fields and hedgerows to get to the back fairway of the golf course, then walk through half the golf course to the hill. It seemed like miles. But the hill was so huge it was worth it. The boys asked me if the hill at the golf course was bigger than the hill at Chestnut Ridge, but I wasn’t sure. I haven’t been past that hill in many years, and I know that our memories of things from our childhood always make things seem larger than they are.

To shoot the video below, I held my camera phone in my right hand, leaving only my left hand to hold on to the sled. The problem I had with only one hand on the sled was NOT that I almost fell out of the sled, but that I couldn’t steer. As I went down the hill, I had to steer by dragging my feet in the snow to avoid running over other sledders.

At least I didn’t drop the phone in the snow.