On Monday we celebrated Mike’s Birthday again (to be fair, that was his actual birthday). He requested two chile verde burritos from Mi Ranchito (he happily ate them for several meals). Fran made a sweet potato cake but the platter it was sitting on in the oven shattered (from the heat) embedding the cake with tiny glass fragments. It was also hard to get the cake off the broken platter and it fell… a couple of time. But we popped a “9” candle on top of it and sang anyway. Then it was on to the presents. I would venture to say that Mike has very nice parents and extend family.
One funny thing that I wasn’t actually going to share: One of Mike’s presents was a Lego Batman figure (kind of like a robot). He put it together and seemed pretty pleased. I told him that I thought it was really cool. He looked at me and said, “You want to buy it?” I asked, “Why do you want to sell me your birthday present?” “Because,” he replied, “I’m all about the money.” Oh dear.
During the week Cam attended a documentary premier about the Garifuna people. It was filmed and edited by Ben Petersen, one of cam’s coworkers, while he was attending BYU. Ben did an outstanding job and you can see a trailer of his video below.
March 3, 2013. UPDATE: Ben has made his documentary available to watch on YouTube now. This is it:
One of Mike’s birthday presents was an Xbox Kinect. Now, before certain people accuse me of getting him this because it was present at a certain party… Mike had asked for a Kinect months ago, having used one at a friend’s house. I just want to say for the record: Wow, this is a cool toy. There was just nothing like this when I was growing up. We played a bit and it’s a blast (more games incoming). As per some unspecified parental guidelines somewhere I recorded my kids using the Kinect to they could laugh at themselves twenty years down the road.
And this is the year the Hughes family will not be the shame of the neighborhood. We used SilverLeaf Landscaping for our lightning needs and unhesitatingly recommend them- we are thrilled with the results. Fran picked red, white and green for the house lights. I have no idea how to take a picture of this so you get this crappy photographic abomination. But we didn’t stop with the house. White lights on the juniper trees…
…which have this nativity nestled between them. The pine tree in our front yard got done up in red with larger white bulbs. And green for the peach tree (and that’s an angel sitting next to it). Yes indeed, we are going to run these things 24/7, 365 days of the year. Yahoo!
And we finally managed to finish decorating our Christmas tree! Although it won’t really stay finished for long. I’m pretty sure there was some kind of ornament war going on this morning when I came downstairs. However, there were no survivors left to question. I look forward to the day when our tree will be left alone and we can upgrade to something nicer and decorate it with a bit more flair.