Seems like the weather is the talk of the towns in all the areas that I check up on! Here it has 'warmed up' to be staying in the 30's most of the time during the day and 20's at night. It started out sunny this AM but now the next storm expected tonight is working its way in as cloud cover. Yesterday though, snowed all day long and we got over 7 inches of new snow during the day! There hasn't been any reports yet of local snowfall but in Spokane, over 56 inches broke the records there for this time of year. We're supposed to get another 5 to 8 inches tonight and tomorrow. At our house we have over 3 feet of snow so far.
Christmas was really great this year. I got the things I'd been really wanting without too much begging, the new XM radio that records up to 5 channels at once, stores up to 100 hours of programing, gets a program guide in the radio so you can see whats coming up on that channel for 3 days ahead. And it can pause and rewind live radio for up to 30 minutes. In this radio they FINALLY got all the different features into one radio! As well as added new ones.
I was really blown away when I opened the one that Stacy and Sandy had gotten together for me, a new Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera with 2 lenses!! Totally unexpected and very much appreciated, it is a really incredible camera loaded with some excellent features. And according to Stacy, I even did OK with her gifts this year. See, I occasionally barely scrape by with what I get her, she reads me like a book and is fantastic. I seem to miss a few chapters on her end and sometimes miss the mark. But I got the big thumbs up for this year!! Hopefully after all these years I can start a new trend and keep it up with her gifts!
One item I got her was season 7 of a TV show from Australia that we first saw and really got into a few years back. McLeod's Daughters is a show that started out as a couple of sisters that inherit the family cattle ranch and decide to run it together with the remaining female staff. After 8 years, many cast characters had come and gone, gone into witness protection, died or moved to Argentina. OK, so it's an Australian soap opera kind of along the lines of the old Dallas TV show here, cows not oil. But it is a really good show, some good stories and acting. Love that Australian accent too!!!!!!!!!
So with the snow and such we had a McLeod's Daughters 'marathon' of season 7. Their season, series, is 32 shows long. So 8 DVD's of shows for the average season. We'll be watching the last 2 episodes of season seven tonight.
We'd started to watch it on our Canadian satellite receiver a few years back and I started to get the region 4 (Australian) DVD sets of the shows for Stacy when I found out they were available. A couple of years back season one was shown on US TV but it was so chopped up for commercials and edited for the Australian slang that it lost the quality of the show. In Australia the show just ended a few months back after 8 years. And now all the season's up to seven, are available from Amazon.com in US versions so you don't have to get a region free DVD player like we'd done to watch them. Season 8 is supposed to be released in the US in a few months. We'd even tried to watch them on the sites from Australia as all season 8 episodes are being shown free on-line but they're in region four on line also so we can't watch them on the computer. Yet. I'm still checking on that though! It's relatively easy to make a computer DVD "region Free", but the Media Player, haven't got that figured out.
Our daughter Sandy's Hawaiian adventure is winding down. They fly home on New Year's Day. She said she's been taking over 300 photo's a day with her Nikon. She's really enjoyed it, doesn't think she'd ever want to live there though because of the cost of everything there is so high. She's had quite the Christmas vacation though!
Laura had to work on Christmas, I don't miss those days!!!, but Stacy talked with her a few times that day on the phone. Cold and icy there.
Sean called and said he'd just had a relaxing day. He'd bought himself and Brandy a 46 inch Sony flat screen and Sandy had gotten him a X-Box for Christmas. He's got a friend that will sell him a Playstation and he's looking for a Wii. He wants to have them all! He said he wished he could have been up for our white Christmas. Our only real white Christmas as a family was exactly 20 years earlier when we had Christmas at Stacy's folks when they lived in Oregon.
Mike and Brenda are out in Missouri for a week, visiting and spending time with the parents. I'm hoping he's taking a lot of pictures!
Guess that's it for this post. We hope everyone has a great New Year's Eve doing whatever it is that you'd do on New Year's Eve. Old fogies us, we usually watch the ball drop live on an East coast channel at 9 PM our time, check out some other areas activities, then call it a night by 10:00.
Next post, next year!
Type later, Tad
Christmas was really great this year. I got the things I'd been really wanting without too much begging, the new XM radio that records up to 5 channels at once, stores up to 100 hours of programing, gets a program guide in the radio so you can see whats coming up on that channel for 3 days ahead. And it can pause and rewind live radio for up to 30 minutes. In this radio they FINALLY got all the different features into one radio! As well as added new ones.
I was really blown away when I opened the one that Stacy and Sandy had gotten together for me, a new Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera with 2 lenses!! Totally unexpected and very much appreciated, it is a really incredible camera loaded with some excellent features. And according to Stacy, I even did OK with her gifts this year. See, I occasionally barely scrape by with what I get her, she reads me like a book and is fantastic. I seem to miss a few chapters on her end and sometimes miss the mark. But I got the big thumbs up for this year!! Hopefully after all these years I can start a new trend and keep it up with her gifts!
One item I got her was season 7 of a TV show from Australia that we first saw and really got into a few years back. McLeod's Daughters is a show that started out as a couple of sisters that inherit the family cattle ranch and decide to run it together with the remaining female staff. After 8 years, many cast characters had come and gone, gone into witness protection, died or moved to Argentina. OK, so it's an Australian soap opera kind of along the lines of the old Dallas TV show here, cows not oil. But it is a really good show, some good stories and acting. Love that Australian accent too!!!!!!!!!
So with the snow and such we had a McLeod's Daughters 'marathon' of season 7. Their season, series, is 32 shows long. So 8 DVD's of shows for the average season. We'll be watching the last 2 episodes of season seven tonight.
We'd started to watch it on our Canadian satellite receiver a few years back and I started to get the region 4 (Australian) DVD sets of the shows for Stacy when I found out they were available. A couple of years back season one was shown on US TV but it was so chopped up for commercials and edited for the Australian slang that it lost the quality of the show. In Australia the show just ended a few months back after 8 years. And now all the season's up to seven, are available from Amazon.com in US versions so you don't have to get a region free DVD player like we'd done to watch them. Season 8 is supposed to be released in the US in a few months. We'd even tried to watch them on the sites from Australia as all season 8 episodes are being shown free on-line but they're in region four on line also so we can't watch them on the computer. Yet. I'm still checking on that though! It's relatively easy to make a computer DVD "region Free", but the Media Player, haven't got that figured out.
Our daughter Sandy's Hawaiian adventure is winding down. They fly home on New Year's Day. She said she's been taking over 300 photo's a day with her Nikon. She's really enjoyed it, doesn't think she'd ever want to live there though because of the cost of everything there is so high. She's had quite the Christmas vacation though!
Laura had to work on Christmas, I don't miss those days!!!, but Stacy talked with her a few times that day on the phone. Cold and icy there.
Sean called and said he'd just had a relaxing day. He'd bought himself and Brandy a 46 inch Sony flat screen and Sandy had gotten him a X-Box for Christmas. He's got a friend that will sell him a Playstation and he's looking for a Wii. He wants to have them all! He said he wished he could have been up for our white Christmas. Our only real white Christmas as a family was exactly 20 years earlier when we had Christmas at Stacy's folks when they lived in Oregon.
Mike and Brenda are out in Missouri for a week, visiting and spending time with the parents. I'm hoping he's taking a lot of pictures!
Guess that's it for this post. We hope everyone has a great New Year's Eve doing whatever it is that you'd do on New Year's Eve. Old fogies us, we usually watch the ball drop live on an East coast channel at 9 PM our time, check out some other areas activities, then call it a night by 10:00.
Next post, next year!
Type later, Tad
Comments
In a few hours it will be another new year 2009 WOW!!!!!! To think I've lived this long to see this it was something for me to think of 1976 when my oldest son was born in 1958 the hospital where I was in brought in one of my meals and they had put a paper baby with a sash around him that said Graduation 1976on the tray that sure sounded like a hundred years from 1958 and to think now it is the coming new year 2009 ....To everyone especially Tad & Stacy have a have a great 2009 and HAPPY NEW YEAR....