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I’ll keep the commentary to a minimum. The mess was at a maximum!

After opening some presents, we took a breakfast break. Mallory of course insisted that her new baby doll sit beside her at breakfast. Sorry for the crappy photo!

Then back to the fun!

For Christmas dinner, we continued our (tradition?… I think this is the second year in a row…) of eating at our favorite Chinese restaurant. As should be expected, the place was packed (eating Chinese on Christmas is a big Jewish thing, if you didn’t know – I certainly didn’t before I moved out East!). We arrived a bit late (5:30pm), and thus had to wait a while for a table. We were finally seated and waited a very long time just to get menus and water – which only came after we asked for them. The tea kettle was put on our table, but no cups. It looked like there were a total of 4 wait staff working the entire room of maybe 200+ people – they were severely understaffed! We ordered and eventually got some food, but after waiting a while one dish never showed. It was already 7:30pm – past Hannah’s bedtime and quickly approaching Mal’s. We finally gave up, I went to the front door guy and settled the bill – learning our last dish was not on the order, so we would have never gotten it – then walked back into the kitchen to obtain some carryout boxes to pack up food, and left. This all sounds like a great disappointment, and it was pretty frustrating for Adrienne and me, but I have to say there’s a great bright spot: both of the girls were awesome! Very well behaved, and that made this parent very happy. Plus we have leftover Moo Shu Duck.

This weekend we took the girls to the town kid’s spookfest at the town square. Costumes were last-minute pulled from what we’ve gotten from friends, which is to say the choices were either too big or too small. Oh well. Mal had her choice of dressing up as a doctor or a lamb. Hannah… didn’t have a choice. She ended up as a pea pod. We didn’t really get any good photos of Hannah, but Adrienne assures me she’ll be tortured on the real Halloween as well. Despite the serious photo, Mallory actually seemed to like her costume. We spent a little bit of time at the spookfest, but Mallory soon decided that rather than trick or treating, marching in the costume contest or watching the magic show, she’d rather go across the street to the library. So we did. I guess enjoyment of Halloween may be a genetic trait handed down from my parents!

Don’t get me wrong, I use and generally like the dictation abilities of iOS6, but Siri continues to be pretty useless to me. Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon. Ok, so I am a curmudgeon. But whatever. Anyway, I’ve discovered that Siri is terrible at doing what I ask, but seems to have no problem understanding Mallory and her non-word babbling. Sometimes she gets a hold of my phone and has already learned how to cue up Siri, and that she should “talk” after the sound and that Siri will understand. A recent exchange:

It would seem Mallory likes Siri’s voice birthday and some real estate person in Orlando and knows something about Android 10 or at least wants to know something about Android 10. Which is impressive since the current release is only 4.x. I hope she’s not getting confused with Blackberry’s latest offering.

And with that, I present to you the effects of low humidity and fleece blankets.

For those of us who have to work tomorrow, boo! For those of us that get to celebrate Washington’s birthday with a day off: yeah!

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And I know animated GIFs are all the rage, so here’s one for you.

I know all of you felt listless these last few days, since this very blog has been not working.

Actually, I just noticed this morning. Don’t know exactly how long it’s been down (other than some time after my Dec. 9th post). Odd. I was a bit worried as it was showing a database error. And while I do a weekly backup of the blog content, I’m a bit lax on backing up the all important SQL database.

I share because I know you care.

Anyway, after looking into it, it appears somehow a space was entered into the database password in my config file, so the solution was as quick and easy as the delete key.

So if you made it through all that, here’s a small reward. Last night we went to the local county zoo to check out their Christmas lights. It’s not quite the same without snow (are you listening, Mother Nature???!!!), but it was a nice little venture out.

Peacocks sleeping in the trees!

My beautiful wife!

But it wasn’t the Fourth of July. This was yesterday.

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With beautiful weather on Friday, we hopped down to nearby Branch Brook Park to check out the cherry blossom trees.

And more and more Mallory is loving jumping up and down in her, uh, jumper thingy.