The moonlight from this weekend.

It's a little spooky looking in this picture.

Chippy snuggled down and asleep in Julie’s jacket.

Who knew a little critter could be so sweet and well-loved by all of us.

My sister totally surprised Johnny at work!

They shopped for a couple bags worth of groceries and after he finished ringing them up, they informed him the goodies were all for him! He thoroughly enjoyed the drop-in and fun of the surprise. We laughed about it when he got home. He started the story with, "Soooo, you'll never guess what happened to me tonight...?!"

The skyline looks a little different this morning...!

More changes to come. We have quite a few dead trees in the front yard so we are working on getting rid of them this weekend. Four down, four to go. The good news, we will still have plenty left. ;)

The boys and I repeated our Waffle House birthday traditions.

Johnny was only months old the first time he met Jeannine at Waffa. She's been waiting on us ever since! She calls them her waffle babies. :)

Julie’s Thanksgiving brisket was awesome!

She coupled it with au gratin potatoes and cornbread cakes, yum!  Look at all that golden brown & delicious yumminess!  Janice made a cherry chocolate cake à la mode to finish it off.

We enjoyed a combo of Thanksgiving and Birthday at my mom’s house this week.

On a shipping mission and enjoying life from the “cockpit”.

I love how Shadow just stays there, sitting with Johnny, through all the craziness of opening his presents. :)

Dinner after presents.

Johnny got to pick where we went for his birthday dinner. Rooster's is ALWAYS a good call!

Just so you know we had a good reason, he has to work on his actual birthday (Friday) so we figured we better get the party started early when all of us could join!

Johnny mired in the gifts Julie “wrapped”.

If you look closely, you can see Shadow sneaking in from the left to find a lap. :)

Birthday coffee!

If you know anything about our family, you know we all try to milk our birthday celebrations for everything we can get out of then. This year is no exception as we started celebrating Johnny's on Wednesday! He and I went out for breakfast at B&Bs and special coffee treats at Starbucks. It was just a good time of reflecting on the year and thinking about the future. I like having a coffee pal!

I snapped this picture when I stumbled on this scene while doing a little shopping in Columbus!

It was a nice night to take an outside walk to the stores at Easton. I was rewarded by this view and picture. ;)

This year Cognex changed up the Thanksgiving gift tradition!

They let us pick from an assortment of options. I grabbed the international munch pack. We got an assortment of snacks and candy from all over the world. It's fun to try them as we pass them around to each other.

50 hrs later, epic meal on the left. 10 days later, epic meal on the right!

Julie's making a brisket for one of our Thanksgiving meals. That's the one on the left. It cooks for over 50 hours! On the right, the other half of the meat is brining to become corned beef in ten days or so.

The last brisket she made (with her homemade North Carolina style barbecue sauce) was so yummy, we all insisted that what she should make for this week. The mustard based sauce is awesome too!

She usually makes the corned beef into a cabbage stew that is a fam fave too!


What is this wizardry...?!

Ok, this is your last update on the future today... I have heard rumor of these hybrid computer/table/phones from Microsoft, but never seen one in person. Not a bad approach. It is a decent solution for the whole bendy screen problem. Let's you fold it back on itself if you want a "phone", open it up for a full screen tablet feel, and even set it on a table hinged open like a laptop to reference something on one screen and type or do something on the other like a laptop. An interesting concept. It will be interesting to see if it takes off.

Speaking of the future...

Has anyone been in a store that uses these digital price tags yet? They are like the display on a Kindle or Boogie Board. They only use battery power to update or change the display. Otherwise, they just sit there showing the last thing they were programmed to. It's a big advantage, when they need to change the price for sales, or hang a different product, or completely rearrange the store, they can just execute a command that flashes them all to the updated info. Pretty cool setup.

Welcome to the future...!

I decided to run a quick internet speed check while buzzing down the highway this weekend. The download speeds match what I get in my home office and the upload speeds are 2.5x! This is on my mobile phone... It's crazy to think about this kind of bandwidth in the palm of our hands.

For whatever it's worth, all the video conferencing and image/video exchange requires me to have the fastest consumer internet for my home office that money can buy, and this mobile service beats it in some cases...

This is the coolest PopSocket and the best use of a LivePhoto I’ve ever captured. :)

 If you zoom in, you can see the individual grooves in the “vinyl” record.

Andy loves apple cider! It’s fun to find a jug each season and bring it home for him.

I enjoy it too, so we drink it together.

The epic battle for height in our house...! :)

Andy thinks he can take me... It's going to be close! It's fun that he's always stretching his head up, looking me in the eye, trying to see if the top of his head is higher than mine yet!

This is a fun feature of our phones where you can just point them at a person and get a height measurement. It seems to be accurate to about a quarter or half inch!

It’s cool how the tiny rain drops magnify the underlying pixels on my phone.

When you change the angle, it magnifies a different colored pixel depending on the angle and they shimmer/change colors.  My picture doesn’t do it justice, but hopefully you get the idea.

This is what happens when two cats want the same space!

It’s nice to be able to peek in on Zac during college life too.

He plays the drums at his local church in PA on the weekends. This was the livestream from last week.

Andy was leaving for work and pointed out I should take a look at the sunrise earlier this week!

Boy was he right!

This I what I feel like when a tag itches me on a new shirt and I can’t get rid of it...!

 I guess Chungus had some extra energy to burn off...! Haha.

My nephew on the starting blocks for the 200 backstroke.

He's in the lane closest to the bottom of the pictures.  He pulled off the only first place finish for his team's meet yesterday against the five time Division 2 champs!  Pretty impressive mister!

You can see the news article here:

https://wingatebulldogs.com/news/2020/11/21/mens-swimming-game-recap-queens-defends-home-turf-with-167-95-triumph-over-wingate-saturday.aspx

I thought this old plow made a good decoration and a cool picture.

I love this picture of Andy.

He was just in the middle of his school work and I snapped this pic while walking by.

Chungus chillin’ in her Hammock!

Percy posing perfectly at the window

Like father like son!

It's getting to that time of year when I appreciate having a warm coat to work in for my outside chores. I always remember my dad having his denim winter work coats. Those had gotten harder to find over the years so when I needed one of my own, I started looking at Carhartt and actually picked one of those for my casual winter coat. I had a worn out old winter coat I was using for working around the house.

Fast forward a year or two, and I was going through some of my dad's old stuff I still needed to sort. Imagine my surprise when I found where he had started wearing a Carhartt too and had one in good shape tucked away in the barn. So I pulled it out, dusted it off, and now I have a great one for working around the house too!

I enjoyed a little nighttime photography while I was out on my walk this past weekend.

These were taken at about 10p. I like it that you can see a star in the bottom pic.

We keep wanting to take MORE pictures of Chungus the squirrel hanging out out in her burrito hammock!

She’s so cute in it!

All the fun of a virtual birthday party with my sister! :)

We had plenty of good laughs and made some more fun memories.

Julie’s friend Jules crocheted her this afghan!

Very pretty, and a very nice thing to do for a friend! They've each found a kindred spirit over the internet. :)

Turns out we have an oak tree in the yard!

I never paid attention before, but noticed it started dropping acorns into the gutter on the barn this year. It's a welcome addition to our "woods"! ;)

Is sure was fun to connect with everyone for Susan’s birthday.

We had pets, drawers knives, cakes, contests and laughter!

This picture reminds Andy and me a lot of me!

Andy was helping some friends help a friend move. Of course he ended up directing the packing of the truck (I wonder where he gets that from?!). He thought someone had sent him a picture of me!

Chungus is stealing our hearts with all her cure little poses in her burrito!

🔥 High speed internet...!🔥

This is me out mobile around Ohio the other day. Higher speeds than most wired home internet service! Crazy...

Julie found the ULTIMATE puffball mushroom in our field!

She slides it up sautéed it, and even shared a few pieces with me. YUM!

This has to be the last of my fall color pictures for this year...

It was a left over, after sunset, from last weekend. Monday and Tuesday pretty much brought down the leaves. Whatever was left got removed in yesterday's winds!

We had some pretty high winds yesterday!

They topped out at a sustained 31mph and were enough to blow a few trees over in the area!

Chungus looks adorable when she sits in her burrito nest!

I thought this made a cool picture!

Ian’s team came from behind to break a 7,500 day winning streak of Carson Newman!

They won by ONE POINT by taking 1-2-3 in the second to last race and fighting for second place in the last race! What an exciting meet.

Here you can see Ian starting in his relay (above) and winning a photo finish by about half of a hand (below) for the 4 IM! He managed to bee out his roommate by a fraction of a second to win his heat! ;)

It was fun to be able to see my nephew getting ready for his first official collegiate swim meet!

I'm proud of what he's accomplishing!

It was fun to watch the boys working on maintaining their balisongs together.

I like the water bottle and old Cognex camera they're using to prop up their various devices and tools along the way. Andy is the sharpener, Johnny is the tuner.

Chungus passed out after a long day of eating and running around her cage!

It's cute to see the little arms sticking up in the air...

A view from our neighborhood that I haven’t noticed before.

Looking East from Janice's neighbor's back yard.