Category Archives: Life

I just finished reading this huge article in Outside magazine about this company that’s trying to start selling completely recycled or sustainably created outdoor/active clothing. Most polyesters/fleeces are made from petro-chemicals, this company wants to make them from recycled materials and … corn. Plus, they want to donate 10% of profits to charities, and have limits on CEO earnings. I don’t know if they’ll stay in business, but I like the looks of their clothes and I thought you all would too. Check out their stuff at:

Plus, they’ve set up a pretty cool blog. I really wasn’t sure where to put a link to this one, but I wanted to add it to the site somewhere. For now, they are on the side-bar in the “Other Blogs” area. Enjoy!

Well, yesterday it officially became time to donate my hair. I got it all chopped off! I had requests to take before and after shots, so here they are.

Nope, no secrete hidden sister, those are both pictures of me!

Took this shot using my new lens as Mark passed this truck at a possibly illegal speed in the middle of Indiana. It’s not as focused as I might have liked, but I like it.

We had a great party on Saturday night! Maike brought over all of her stuff for the feuerzagenbowle (actually feuerzangenbowle). This is a pretty and tasty German tradition that we’ve been able to convince Maike to make for us every year. Usually we do it around Halloween, but this year we waited until close to Christmas which is more along the lines of how it is made in Germany.

We also had a lot of fun decorating inappropriate Christmas cookies, and stuffing our faces full of Ute’s incredibly good breads and Black Forest Cherry cake. We had a great crowd, and a really nice time. Thanks everybody!

I’ve started up a spot in the photo gallery for adding in pictures of Christmas decorations and festivities. Feel free to check it out: Christmas 2006 Gallery.

While some families watch football, and others go to parades, the Thayer Family has slightly different rituals. This morning, Mark, TJ, Chelsea and I all ran in the Kirkwood Turkey Day 5k. Mark got an incredible time of 24 minutes, and TJ and I both ran our very first 5ks in which we did not stop once to walk! It was a great morning for everybody.

At 10am the annual Thayer Family Thanksgiving Brunch began. This tradition dates back more than 5 years, and it has grown every year. This year we had well over 50 people, and my old friend Amy from HS stopped by with her new super cute puppy dog named Murray. Supposedly Kirkwood lost the football game today though. A great dinner began at the nice and early hour of 3pm. It was so wonderful having everybody in both families together for such a great meal.

After dinner, we all retired to the basement for the epic Guitar Hero 2 Blowout Play-Off. They all started playing. And playing. And playing. It’s now 3 hours later, and there’s no sign of stopping. Yep, that’s what I call a holiday!

This was my view for most of the day today as we made the trip back to St. Louis for the holiday. Yes, the car is dirty.

Some days around here are beautiful. You can walk around in shorts in the middle of January. But some days are just plain icky. Today was cold, dreary, rainy, windy, gross. That’s ok though. I’ve got a lot of projects to finish before Christmas, and it’s good to have the time to work on them.