4 Seconds A Day: December 2014

That marks two years of these

Ready To See It Go

 The Fort Wayne Krupps found themselves in the Stroud for New Years.

 We got Brad drunk and the Gem & Keystone

 No problem

 Yuula loved on her cousin Dylan

 Then she beat their asses

 I introduced the boys to fireworks

 That's what uncles are for, no?

 Yuula's already a pro

 Yuula picked out this pink smoke bomb

 Sparkles

 Making a mess

Decent show this year. Here's to getting away from 2014. 

2015, you better make it up to me.

4 Seconds A Day: December 2013

I may have cheated a little bit at the end there...

From Slough To Ka-Pow In Under Two Hou....rs

The ripple effects of an accidental [pun] appointment with the dentist and the intention of killing three birds with one stone found us late on NYE way up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is every bit as wonderful as the Americanized late hit television series The Office depicts it, as in, not very wonderful. But as we do, we make the best of it, and managed to have an entertaining dinner at the only joint open at 9pm, one Ruby of Tuesday (still the only entity giving any purpose to that specific day of the week), with the company on Susie who downed her fair share of classic margaritas amongst a multitude of randomly shaped/colored pills from a gold brass box she keeps hidden somewhere on her person for just such an occasion, what we can only hold responsible for us now being able to add such visually magical terms as "the shrimp dance" and ... well, let's move on from it.

Laura got her steak so all was right with the world and Yuula enjoyed the challenge in capturing a photo of diners as they stuff their faces one last time for the year.

I felt a bit like I was watching it all happen, as I went for the 8oz of malbec and overheard the vast array of resolutions being made and subsequently broken before they even saw the light of day.

Then the baby boy dropped before the ball in Times Square.

We brought Susie back to her place, recovered from a day of highs and lows, and began the winding roads to our place just before 11pm. By the time we got to our home and got our shoes off, ready for bed, throwing in the towel on 2013, we (Yuula) got a 3rd wind and decided we'd take up our young new neighbors on their earlier invite to their place for a little Auld Langing. When we walked in the door it was 11:44. At 11:45 I was halfway thru a pint of Yuengling. At 11:46 I had a second, as we caught up with some of our other neighbors we'd met once before, but never scraped any surfaces. They were silly, and well ahead of us on the inebriation, considering the four of us were drinking for one. We giggled, one girl admitted to just vomiting moments before. This was a party. We found shelter from the beer pong in the warmth of the front room (I'm not sure this houses rooms have designations yet), as a mad rush to arm the parties occupants with things that make pops and smoke, including the three year old, and as the countdown hit 00:05 someone threw a blanket over me and ran away. I was thinking how strange this all seemed when we started hearing loud blasts coming from just outside, so....

Happy New Years. We were home and in bed by 12:06am.

The Fire And The Works

I'm not crazy about fireworks but...

they put on a pretty good display in Dansbury Park last night.

Yuula covered her ears and buried her face for most of the show, and when it finally ended she clapped and yelled "Buhbye!".

When asked about it later whether or not she liked the fireworks she said, "yeah. loud, pretty noise".

Good girl.

Saffron Flavored Sparklers

And we're back. Back to life. Back to reality. Back to whatever else Soul II Soul sang about. Laura's home today and I had some workings going on this morning. Little afternoon hiatus before I'm back to it. Taking down some holiday decor. The branches over the table have almost completely shed all their needles off and if it weren't for our new ornament storage boxes showing up broken from FedEx we'd probably be looking at taking the tree down. Thanks to the nice lady at the Container Store call center, she's personally going to the store in Dallas to buy us new ones and ship them out post haste. Seems like the tree just gained an extra week of warmth. I ain't mad about it.

So!



We finally flipped thru photos from New Year's with Eric & Fatih. Good times. Turning of the calendar year draws good company for us. We had a nice dinner of saffron chicken over basmati & asparagus. I smell a tradition. Oh no, that's the saffron.




Yuula stuffed herself full and took a quick mama nap.



We exchanged a few gifts. We think Eric likes this one.



Then it was time to get down to business.



We started off small with some simple sparklers and us running about with them. I think the designs people make says a lot about them.


Laura/Yuula


Eric


Fatih


Travis


The Gang


Near


Far


Laura fell


Teaching Yuula to call cats

Eric had a message for you all




And a dinosaur firework


Then we played a rousing game of Shut the Box, the holiday classic we never knew could be so rowdy.



Shouting things at each other like "That's a high number!" and cursing the nines really made it for us. Plus Laura cheated so she won.



We went back out for a little more sparklers, just in the road this time.






You'd never know.





Then it was on to the big boys.




Mostly this is all captured on video, as you may or may not have seen in our New Year's wrap-up video yesterday. If not... do yourself a favor.



Then it was time for the countdown!!



and we were all too tired to care. We did do some small poppers in the house and then headed out for the grand finale of fireworks where I captured this series of events...






New Year's makes Laura clumsy

Happy New Year folks