Christmas Extravaganza '09

In advance of going to Michigan for Christmas, Joyce let us know that part of our present this year, would be some sort of a family outing on Christmas day. None of us had any idea what we were doing but we had plenty of guesses. In the weeks leading up to the big day, Becky began referring to the unknown even as "Christmas Extravaganza '09".

On Christmas day Joyce said we should be ready to leave around 1:30, and that we should put on clothes suitable for being outside. Right at 1:30 we heard a knock on the door. At the door was a wrapped package, and by the time we got to the door, whoever dropped it off was already driving away. Here I can be seen looking into the camera as I think to myself, "what is this?"


Joyce then opened up the package, which was the first clue to our Christmas day scavenger hunt! (The event was set up by someone else. Though Joyce arranged for it to happen, she didn't know any more about the clues than we did.)


The first clue took us to Walgreens. As we drove up I suggested that perhaps we all had to get the H1N1 vaccine before they gave us the next clue...


Fortunately I was wrong, and we just had to pick up some pictures at 1-hr photo.


Those pictures took us to the giant tire swing in downtown Grand Rapids.


At the tire swing we picked up a large sheet that had a bunch of holes cut out of it, and the name of the library at Calvin College. We figured out that we needed to hold it up to the plaque in front of the building to get our next clue, which read "Classifieds personals gr press".


We then went to Sarah's house which is nearby to grab that day's paper, which had our next clue. This clue references a book that was a childhood favorite of Becky's, and said that "The King" (Bernie) should choose who calls the given phone number...


This clue took us to the windmill at the post office in Holland.


This clue then sent us to JP's, which is Becky's favorite coffee shop.

Hidden in the sculpture outside of JP's was a bag full of puzzle pieces.


Once assembled, the pieces told us where we could find our final treasure.


At the last stop, we found a wrapped package full of treasure chest Christmas ornaments, and a note reminding us to always "treasure the time we have with each other." Here we are all holding the ornaments, which will always be a great reminder of what a fun day we had, and how blessed we are to have such wonderful families.


This Extravaganza '09 was a blast, and is certainly something we will talk about for a very long time. This whole adventure took us about 3 hours, and could have been much longer if Sarah hadn't caught a mistake I made in reading one of the clues...

The clue that took us to JP's involved counting the number of times the words "Just for now" are sung in the intro of this song, and then doing some math on that number to arrive at our address. However, I didn't catch the part where it said to just do this for the intro of the song. Instead, we listened to the song multiple times through, counting the number of times it was sung in the entire song (which is somewhere around 120)! In addition to being a bit obnoxious, the results of that number would have taken us to some random address on 98th Street instead of 57 8th Street! Many thanks to Sarah for catching my mistake before we drove all the way out to 98th Street. And a fair warning before you click on that link above: that song is still stuck in my head two weeks later.

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Christmas in Michigan

We had such an awesome time visiting friends and family in Michigan for Christmas. As always with our Michigan trips, our schedule was a bit hectic as we tried to see as many of the people we don't get to see very often.

For our first stop we spent a few nights with Sarah and Josh at their new house. It was very fun for us to get to see the results of their hard work on the house over the past few months, and we just like hanging out with them. We opened a few gifts together, and you can see how excited Josh was for his new slippers since his socks won't get as dirty as they do now...


One down side to the weekend with them was that Josh beat me at Tiger Woods golf. (Please note that Josh and I refused to use the Tiger Woods character in protest of his recent actions. Instead we played as female golfers. I guess Josh is a better female golfer than I am.)

Another highlight of our Michigan trip was a brief reunion of some of my closest college friends at Luke's house in Cadillac. Luke, Joel, and Ryan have been great friends for over 10 years now, which means we should all start acting our age one of these days...you know who you are. Thanks Luke for the delicious pork tacos, how about posting the recipe in the comments section!


We also met up with Jill & Jut, Matt & Sheri, and Ron & Luann. Becky lived with Jill and Sheri, and Ron and Luann were the master and mistress of ceremonies at our wedding. They also let me stay at their house every time I visited Michigan while Becky was still in school, and I watched the 2002 World Cup in their basement at 2am. All that to say, they're good friends, and it was great to see them. Plus there a total of four golden retrievers which was hilarious. Not sure why we didn't move that chair before the picture...


We spent the rest of our week with Becky's parents, and Marcus, Sarah and Sophie the cat. Actually, we didn't spend much time with Sophie since she isn't a fan of Zoe the dog. We had a lot of fun with the Bykers, especially on Christmas day when we had "Christmas Extravaganza 2009!" I'll get to that in the next blog post. We also went to an amazing Christmas Eve service where I decided that some day I will be in a bell choir, and I'm very excited about that.

Any holiday would not be complete with the Bykers without completing at least one puzzle. This year's was a Santa Clause with a Coca Cola. Next time I should keep track of how many times I say, "this piece is definitely missing!" No pieces were missing.


My level of manliness went up a bit due to this year's exchange of gifts with the Bykers. I got a bunch of awesome tools that I don't really know how to use yet. Thankfully there is Google, and dads who know what their doing. (I do know how to use the tool pictured below...and Mr. Anonymous poster to the comments section, no "tool" jokes please, just the taco recipe).


This is the annual picture of the family with Joyce's parents. It took several tries as we attempted to get Zoe in the picture. She cooperated by looking at the camera, but various relatives kept looking at the dog instead of the camera! So Zoe the dog got cropped out.


We even got to see my parents who drove through a crazy snow storm basically to have breakfast with us the day after Christmas. Thanks to everyone for making it a great Christmas. We feel blessed to have such great friends and family, but always leave wishing people lived closer. Anyone want to move to Maryland?

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Oh snap

This is easily one of the funniest commercials I've ever seen. It brings joy to my life every time I watch it, which thanks to youtube, is quite often!

Too hot to Handel

I wish I was clever enough to have come up with that title to this blog entry. As it is it was on the sign outside of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this past weekend as they performed Handel's Messiah. It was the first time either of us had ever seen or even heard the entire thing, and it was awesome. I highly recommend seeing it if you get the chance and this may become an annual tradition for us. People dress nicely on the east coast so we did our part and dressed up a bit for the occasion.


The venue was very cool.

On Saturday we hung out with our great friends/relatives Noel and Heidi. Noel was in D.C. for a preaching conference and it was great to get to spend some time with them. For some reason, this is the only picture we took while we were with them. The picture contains the following in order from left to right: First row: cinnamon stick, Second row: gigantic sugar cookie covered in sprinkles, chocolate cigar, triple-decker corned beef sandwich, Third row: Heidi, Noel.

That reminds me, I still have some left over chocolate cigar in our hotel refrigerator.

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Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving we joined Sarah and Josh at my parent's house in Fredonia. We had an awesome time of just eating way too much food and playing tons of games...mostly Settlers of Catan. Zoe is my mascot.


As it turns out, my parents own a Snuggie-type thing that actually preceded the official Snuggie. As you can tell by the picture the old design was not quite as useful as the real deal, but Becky liked it anyway..and Zoe just likes being in pictures.

Stockings are still fun.

We went to see the Christmas Carol movie in 3D. It was cool, especially the part where we got to wear these awesome glasses.

On Thanksgiving I certainly felt very thankful to have such an awesome family...which is nice because we drove through a lot of traffic to hang out with them!

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The past two months.

These last two months have been a bit crazy. Here's a brief summary:

- I finished grad school
- We went to Austria for 10 days
- We packed up, said goodbye to all our Colorado friends, and drove through 4 days of rain on our move to Maryland
- I started my first ever real job
- We bought a house

Austria was amazing - it is such an incredible place. Here we are at a palace in Vienna.

Becky at the Vienna opera house. Yeah, that's right I went to the opera...3.5 hours worth.

My favorite part of the trip was hiking around in these Alps. Easily one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.
The hardest part of leaving Colorado was saying bye to the students we had been mentors to for many years. Before we left, one of the students parents threw us a goodbye party.

Life in Maryland has been good so far. We look forward to updating the blog more often with what's going on in our life on the east coast.

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In good company

As Becky eluded to in the previous post, I completed my requirements for my PhD last Monday. In light of this, there is a bit of information you might find amusing. Another graduate student made an incredible discovery a few months ago. There is a plaque at our research center that lists the name and year of all PhD graduates from the center. Close inspection of this plaque reveals that none other than Charles Norris received his PhD back in 1992.

I am truly honored to be in the same company as this great man.

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