Archive for 2006

I set an achievable goal for myself on the PS2 game Guitar Hero 2. I was going to achieve a five star rating on all the songs with medium difficulty to unlock one of the bonus guitars. I had finished “Institutionalized – Suicidal Tendancies” with a blazing 97% playing nearly the whole song in a rockin power stance.
(see http://www.guitarherobrokemyknee.com for warnings on the power stance)
I was ONE song away yesterday (and an easy one at that) when I started up the PS2 and it said “creating new save game”. It wiped my entire game card. I get to start all over. Time for some finger stretches!

I’m a blogger now too! First entry, birthday. Mom and Dad and Mom and Dad, thanks for kitchen gadgets!

Birthday gift – Food Processor.
It sliced potatoes like a champ for home-made potatoes augratin. Each slice was 1/8 inch thick and it took less than 1 second to decimate a potatoe. The slicer was AWESOME. My cheese sauce needs improvement.

Birthday gift – Kitchen Aid accessories: Pasta Extruder
Made my own spaghetti from scratch using the grinder accessory that presses pasta dough through a shaped grate (think play-dough factory). As for the dough, this was my second attempt at pasta dough, and quite successful. The big improvement came from leaving the kitchen-aide beating the heck out of the dough while I play guitar hero 2. It makes the dough extra gluten-y.

New/Old Toy – Toaster Oven
Our old black and decker toaster oven blew one of its rods apart, so I got a Euro-Pro to replace it. It’s bigger (can do a whole totinos pizza) but excellent. I can slide my whole grill pan into it (with door propped open) and get a little extra top-side broiling in just minutes.

New favorite recipe – Tortilla Pizza
Super easy (and healthy) tortilla pizza recipe from a pillsbury cookbook. It took like 10 minutes, was tastey and contained very few processed food items. My new toaster oven whooped azz on it.

Boy, no camera battery is really boring. I should dig out some older photos and post them. But, for now, I’m having fun just playing with the site. I added a new catagory where site update posts can be archived. If you look through these posts in the future, it will effectively be the same as the “What’s New!” section of the old site.

Also, due to a few requests, I’ve decided to experimentally turn back on comments. Feel free to let me know what you think about a post by clicking on the “comments” link below. Hopefully I’ll have better luck this time moderating the spam.

Update: Ironically, this post is getting more spam than any other! What is up with that? I’m dissallowing comments on this post for the time being. Sorry!

Well, the good news is it’s almost Christmas and life is busy with many wonderful things. The bad news is I lost the charger for my D70 battery and it went dead last week, so no new pictures until the new one comes from Amazon. Sorry.

On Saturday, I put my head down and set up the Movies! page (finally), so go check it out! We don’t have tons of footage just yet, but I’m hopping to add one or two clips from each trip in the future. Enjoy!

The snow storm has hit! We got about 8 inches at our house last night and this morning. It was a nice, thick flaked, windy, blizzard for a few hours, and made driving from and back to school really interesting. Mark says the Passat may be ready for new tires, but the Escape is doing great.

Our Christmas adventures have begun!

On Bruce’s last day in St. Louis we decided to take him on a classic day in the city. We hit up a tour of the Budweiser plant, where I click, click, clicked away. Unlike a lot of large breweries, the origional plant here in St. Louis was founded before the civil war, and the company has worked hard to maintain the beautiful and now very historic buildings on the grounds. All of the original buildings are still being used for their original purposes.

My favorite part of the tour is always the stables. This building was built along with the original Anheuser family homestead and was (and still is) used to house the local Clydesdale population currently working the hitch. Horses not currently working are kept at Grant’s Farm in the south part of town. Anyway, the stain-glassed windows, the huge chandelier, the beautiful Christmas decorations and the fragrant smell only of beer and fresh hay are not common sights in most stables. This one is special.

After the beer tour and possibly a bit more time spent in the hospitality room than we were supposed to, we grabbed lunch at Ameghetti’s on the Hill. I think Mark and Bruce both enjoyed their half-specials and another round of Budweisers. For dessert, we dropped in at Ted Drews, which was still open, but had converted one parking lot to the fresh Christmas greens sale lot for the season. There is something interesting about enjoying a frozen custard while shopping for Christmas trees in the warm (70F!) St. Louis evening.

Pictures from the day are found in the photo 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.