Catching up: Weston-Super-Mare Carnival (also known as Danielle's birth day).

At the exact moment Danielle was entering the world, Mark and I were with his parents at the Weston-Super-Mare carnival.

It is an annual parade (with lit-up floats) which tours around the county at several towns on different nights, all around Guy Fawkes Day. It's unique to this area of the region, and it's a competition, so clubs spend the year building floats to enter them into each parade to compete for nightly and then overall prizes.

There are other people involved to raise money for charity, like these firefighters:



But mostly it's the competitors, on floats, or performing as they walk, and more than anything, it's BRIGHT:



This is Mark, completely lit up by a passing float - this is at night, with no flash at all:


The floats are themed, and fall into different categories, and they all have music, so it's loud, too. It's pretty much like Las Vegas on wheels, in Somerset.





They go all out within the group's chosen theme, including the people who drive the floats:


And so you can get a bit more of the full experience, here's a video of one of them. This is actually of the joint-overall winner of the competition. Just a warning - at one point I flip the camera on its side (I forgot I was videoing and the problems it would cause. We could edit it around, but it's way too much trouble for such a short clip!). But I think you'll get the idea of what it's like - though watching it on video doesn't quite give you the full smack of light and sound of the passing floats!




We imagine Danielle's arrival must have been much the same, just without the fire.

Catching up: Jessica's birthday.

Next up was my birthday.

I also got lots of very nice presents, including this one, from Mom and Dad, which was wrapped up nicely by Amazon. I have bought presents wrapped by Amazon before but I had never seen what it looked like, so in case you're wondering, this is how it arrives:


And this is what was inside:


A cookbook with some very nice looking cakes inside, written by a lady who works for NPR's All Things Considered. The first cake I've made from here was for Mark's mum's birthday this past weekend. Mark chose it - a traditional yellow layer cake with dark chocolate frosting, and it was really yummy. She uses whipped cream in her recipe, which I've never done, and it meant it was nice and fluffy.

Here is a series of photos from my big present:








It's a bread maker, which I really wanted to make my regular bagel making even easier. It's great, and I've already made bagels with it, too!

Like I mentioned on Jenny's blog, I had a giant cookie cake (which I assume is the same thing as a pizookie?)


Here's the first loaf of bread I made, on the day after my birthday:


And the next day we also played one of the games I got - a version of Ticket to Ride designed for 2-3 players, based on a map of the Nordic countries.



It's great.

Catching up: Mark's birthday.

To catch up on the last couple of months, here are some pictures from Mark's birthday.


Along with some DVDs and games and things, he got a new fleece:


We went to Longleat, which is a stately home with a drive-through animal park on its grounds. I'd never been and Mark hadn't visited since he was a kid. It's in Wiltshire county, about an hour from where we live. It's owned by the Marquess of Bath, who is a crazy guy, and we actually saw him walking into his house, wearing slippers and crazy neon patterned pants, followed by his seemingly long-suffering dog. The dog had a Gromit look about him - kind of humoring his wacky owner.

Anyway, the safari is featured on a BBC TV show, and it has lots of different animals there. The monkey area was closed though, because of an outbreak of simian herpes. The weird thing there is that only one monkey is infected, and they can't figure out how a monkey could have managed that on its own. I didn't mind because I'm not a big fan any way, and they're notorious for damaging people's cars.

Here's the first part of the park, where you can get out of your car to look at some giraffes and things:


Our favorite moment of the day probably turned out to be this giraffe which chased a rabbit around for a while:

We couldn't work out what the giraffe wanted, and it seemed the rabbit couldn't either. It kept stopping to eat but then moving along just as soon as the giraffe got close.

Our batteries ran out part way through the day, so I took a lot of pictures on my phone, but I haven't been able to get them off onto the computer yet. So here's one we took before the batteries went dead:


Besides the animals, you can tour the house, which is old, and there are lots of activities on the grounds, including this maze:



The maze was hard, and we never made it into the center, which I think was the objective. Mark would have made it, I'm sure, but we accidentally got separated, which meant that he had an unhappy, lost wife with a cell phone to deal with, so we exited before completing it.


Despite that, we had fun!

Fakesgiving on tour.

Mark and I celebrated our second Fakesgiving today. Mark is working next weekend, so we observed the holiday today rather than the Saturday after, which is when we might normally have it. It was still yummy though!

(Except I have a cold that joined me yesterday - which is why I have a slight "breathing through the mouth" expression on my face...)

I know this isn't a real blog post, but...

...go read this article on Slate. I think it's funny:

http://www.slate.com/id/2234019/

Hornucopia 2009...planning!

Hornucopia 2009

Ok, here is the much-requested blog post, so there is easier discussion about activities and food. I'll keep the list of activities over on the right and add one for food, just to keep it simple. If you want anything added to the list, then comment on this post and I'll add it to the list on the right.

Here are the (constructive) comments that we have had so far:

From Mom:
we were thinking of everyone on their own for breakfast (cereal, toast, juice and cream chipped beef once)....

for sunday we r thinking about our holiday meal....mimi does the turkey and gravy ......julie and tony do sweet potatoes......jessica is doing dressing (can i bake the corn bread ahead of time and freeze ???) and mark can play the music - flutes or does he have a favorite food to prepare...pa is to do pie(s)........jenny mashed potatoes (instant?) and does jeff want to do his green bean casserole or be part of the mashed potatoes or the gravy.....whatever any one wants to do let us know and we will get the ingredients for their project....

the main meal of the day would be out while we r doing an outing.........dinner would be a free for all..........any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated......

From Jenny:
perhaps we could plan for 1 outing and 1 inning for each day. and then add an extra activity as time, energy and motivation permits.

For example:
student ice cream + dome building (plus rec center swimming)
botanical garden hike + bagel making
zoo + coin games
bigger hiking + ice cream ball

or we could write each activity on a note card, categorize them as "inning", "outing", "big outing" (put a symbol in the top corner to indicate), tape them to a board and then arrange them for each day. we could also weight them for '5 - must do' or '1 - if time permits' (put a different ranking in the other corner).

then we can have a family meeting each evening to figure out the night before what we want to do the next day. posting the cards also allows everyone to see and know what's coming so they can plan accordingly. (but no fair moving things around when no one is looking!!)

if you want to participate, you get yourself ready. if you want to sit out an activity, go hide.

and as far as food...i like the idea of breakfast on our own, since everyone gets up at different times. that will keep it simple. we can make a note card for the one cream chip beef morning and put it on "the board"!! oh, and make a note card for the turkey dinner too! :) then we'll have to plan for an ACTIVE activity (ie. hiking) for that day!

yes, put us down for potatoes and green bean casserole. i don't mind doing real potatoes (and maybe instant as a backup). if you want to buy supplies ahead of time, let me know and we'll let you know what we need, or jeff and i can go to the store while we're there.

regarding lunches/dinners -- again that can be planned based on the day's activities. more note cards for the restaurants that we want to make sure we hit!!

From Jessica:
I am definitely all for agile-ly programming our family get together. I too love note cards, though my devotion has been inspired through EFL teaching rather than computer science. Nothing like shifting cut up pieces of paper around to get a group going. And in fact, there is precedence within the Horn family generally - you might remember that we've done this at least once before that's been recorded for posterity (admittedly on a much smaller scale):




Do we need to start writing the note cards before we get there? Can the Clemson folks get a board together before everyone arrives?