Between church and dinner, we took advantage of being dressed up and snapped a family photo. Dogs included. This one came out pretty well. Only one of the 8 of us had to be brought in digitally. Can you tell which one?
Merry Christmas!
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Monthly Archives: December 2006
Our Christmas Card
Some notes on our Christmas card. The cow came from Kathy’s painting she finished in August. It now hangs in the dining room. The Christmas tree came from the trip Nicole and I took to Jamaica. I used it in a talk I recently gave to 300 middle schoolers at St. John Neumann. The talk was about hope and the Christmas tree on the street in the slums of Kingston was one of several signs of hope.
Claire and Danny both did a good job helping on the assembly line. Kathy recommends using photo corners instead of cutting slits in the card.
Note to self: Lighten up all photos sent to Sam’s Club. They come out darker than what shows on screen. Maybe send a test of several levels of brightness. Try something other than AppleWorks since it has a bug allowing only 1 copy to print at a time.
Understanding A Gigabyte
Kelly and I were driving around shopping together, and we started talking about iPods. She is quite happy with her iPod nano and its protective green and pink iSkin. Kids at school like it how hers looks. (She was allowed to bring it to school in the last week of the semester.)
She does wish she had 4 gigabytes like Claire’s instead of just 1 Gigabyte. I pointed out that she made that choice when I offered to pay half of whatever she wanted. “Yeah… but I didn’t really understand a gigabyte… I have to spend more time moving music on and off my Nano.” But otherwise, she is quite happy with it.
I told her I was thinking about getting the 80 gigabyte iPod. She was impressed. “How many songs would that hold?” she asked. I explained that all of the music we have on our iMac adds up to 20 gigabytes. She immediately got that the extra space could be for videos and TV shows.
I did not think to tell her that our very first Mac with a hard drive only had 20 megabytes of hard disk space. That’s a mere 20% of her Nano.
The tech moral of the story: Always buy up on storage/memory space.
One word: WOW!
For this next girl I have only one word… WOW! — Coach B
That’s how Coach B introduced Kelly as he announced her to come up for one of five special “coach’s awards.” That was the third time Kelly was called up for the evening. When Kathy, Claire, and I joined Kelly for the Cross Country banquet, we had early confirmation that she had lettered for the season, much to our and both coaches’ surprise. But we did not know she was going to be called up to stand in front of the crowd for two other reasons. First she was called up and recognized for being a Scholar Athlete. The photo below shows the new athletics director shaking her hand.
I wondered how she achieved Honors Athlete when she had not gotten her first high school report card. The director explained that for freshmen, given cross country is a fall sport, they used the previous semester middle school grades. So here good work in middle school paid off immediately in high school!
Next she was called up with the group that had achieved their letters. In the photo below, you can see her standing near coach B.
The big surprise was at the end when Coach B announced 5 special awards. That’s when he introduced Kelly with the “Wow” word as he explained she had gone from just barely being able to qualify, to not finishing her first meet, to shaving off almost 8 minutes through the season to qualify for a letter in the final meet. For that she earned most improved and got a special award plate handmade by Coach B’s wife. One of the other winners can be seen in crutches. She ran state with a broken bone in her foot that had to have surgery three days after the season ended.
I asked Kelly if she got tired having to keep going up front. Nope.