More Christmas Pictures

I know that Tree hates pictures of kids, but here are a couple more pictures from Christmas.

All 10 nieces and nephews. I will have to dig out the pictures from past years. Every year we have all of the kids on this couch.
Jeff, Sue, Zach, Sara and Joey.Now these next two pictures you might not guess by looking at them, but based on their reaction to being asked to stand and smile next to their families, Jon and Dan find this activity unbearable. I don't know why it is such a surprise to them either. I take these pictures every year. And I have never heard a good reason as to why they don't want their pictures taken with their families. Maybe they are embarrassed, maybe they are lazy. One day they will thank me. But I doubt it will be anytime soon.

Jon, Julie, Bonesaw and "E". Dan, Jody, Princess and Hollywood, and I guess Erin, Lindsey and Tim in the background. It wasn't worth the effort to get Dan to stand there long enough to get the people out of the background, so I just took the picture with them in the background. Maybe if I had set my camera up on a tripod I could have photoshopped them out of the picture.Tim, Deb, Boomer, Crusher and Fuss.And my parents. My mom also is a bit reluctant to getting her picture taken as well.

Christmas

Here are some Christmas Day photos of my nieces and nephews.

Erin, a.k.a. Fuss, Pussycat.
Nick, a.k.a. Pickle, Bonesaw.
Jared, a.k.a. Crusher
Lindsey, a.k.a. Boomer.
Ethan, a.k.a. Auggie, "E".
Zach, a.k.a. Zack.
Josh, a.k.a. Hollywood.
Abbigail, a.k.a. Princess.
Sara, a.k.a. Sarah (or is it the other way around, I forget)
Joey.

Christmas Card

By now, everyone who was on my list should have received their Christmas Card.If you haven't, let me know and I can get one out in the mail to you. But I would like to get a little reader reaction. What did you think of this year's card? Hopefully I get the poll right this time. (The Halloween contest has been officially cancelled because I screwed up the posting. Remind me and next year I will put both 2011 and 2012 entries up for the competition.)

What did you think of this year's Christmas card?
	Best ever.
	Killer Christmas is still number #1.
	You are embarassing yourself, just give up.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

What is your favorite Christmas song?

How about some crowd participation this Monday morning? Come on, who is with me? Dorothy Boyd? I can never really get in the Christmas spirit if there isn't snow on the ground. Last I checked, there wasn't any white stuff on the ground. But to help you and everyone else get into the spirit, I would like to know what your favorite Christmas song is. Mine is the 12 days of Christmas by Jon Denver and the Muppets.

Here is some more Office Humor

I walked into the office one day and there was a bit of a hub bub going on around my Project Manager’s (and direct boss, Pete) cubicle. Pete was gone on this day. Lately the office had been suffering a bit of an invasion of fruit flies (dysofoila melonagaster). And my co-workers had found the source. It was Pete’s trash can where he had been throwing orange peels, apple cores and banana peels and not emptying out on a regular basis. We had a team meeting that day, and when Pete is not in the office, he assigns me the task of running the meeting. First order of business, Pete’s trash can. I made a strong argument that Pete was to reprimanded. He would have to wash out his trash can and would loss his in cubicle privileges for the remainder of the year. Everyone was in favor of this punishment. Then after the meeting someone mentioned that we should put up some signs and caution tape. I have to be honest, it only takes a slight push in the right direction to get me going. After putting up the warning and for the rest of the day, whenever someone walked by Pete’s cubicle, they asked me what it was all about and there was the immediate accusation that I was the culprit to put up the warnings. This same thing happened at my parent’s house during deer season. My brother, Dan, shot a prize buck this year, and brought over a picture of him posing with his trophy. I eventually blacked out one of Dan’s teeth on the picture. Everyone who entered the garage and saw the picture immediately assumed that I was the person to deface the picture. Am I that predictable?

Office / Nerd Humor…..Maybe

Every month at work I have to put together a presentation which updates management on the budgets and schedules of major highway construction projects in the south east region of Wisconsin. And more often than not, I take a part in giving the presentation. There are also handouts that go along with the presentation. I had help from a co-worker as I was preparing the handouts, and she made the point of mentioning that certain cells in the spreadsheet handout were to be a specific color. As you may or may not know every color has a color code. This color code has three components, Red, Green and Blue. Each component can be set to a number between 0 – 255. According to my co-worker, the exact color code for these spreadsheet cells is 255, 192, 0. Fast forwarding to the presentation, I was going through the handout and here what I said, “And as you can see, the projects that are on our Issues and Risks Log are highlighted in orange, or for those of you partial to color codes, 255, 192, 0.” As I am sure you can imagine, nothing but crickets. Well I thought it was funny.

Need a Little Help Here

This blog entry is for any of the handymen out there. I bought my TV and I will be hanging it on the wall. Having the TV up off the floor means I have to do something with all of the electrical components. So what can I do. Here is the wall right now.
And because behind this wall is a closet, I have decided to make a little cubby hole to hold the cable box, stereo receiver, Blue Ray, etc. You can see here that I have made some progress.This is a closer look at the hole. It is really the only place that I can put it. But as you can see I have some electrical conduit running right through the space where I intend to put this cubby hole.This is the back side view looking into the closet. Obviously that middle 2 x 4 will be coming out. But the conduit will still be in the way.My only thought on rectifying this situation was to cut some slits down the 2 x4 and then slide the conduit down as well. This is shown here in red.
This all seems well and good. I'm still not sure if that will give me enough slack in the conduit. Oh and better news, this is a load barring wall.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Shower TV Upgrade

I was able to acquire a TV last month. I used it to replace the TV I had in my shower. Here is the old one.And here is the new one.

More Bad Juggling

I guess it is out of boredom, but as any loyal blog reader knows, juggling is my hobby. And everyone wants more. If I juggle clubs, you want fire. I give you fire, you want knives. If I juggle 3 balls, you want 4. Well just recently I have made a break through, and to some degree, I can now juggle 4 balls. Let me beat all of you to the punch, no I did not invite 2 guys I met on Facebook over. I am far from mastering it, but I am on my way. Check it out.

Also check out the double take I make at Erin Andrews on tv. Also on an unrelated topic, I would like to wish a new loyal blog reader a happy birthday. Al shown here drinking Captain Morgan's out of the bottle, just days ago became a year older, happy birthday.

Calling All Hunters

Well it happened again. More dog crap in my yard. I found this today after work.I know that my brothers have offer the use of their trail cameras to catch the culprit on camera. I am officially taking them up on their offers. Let me know when you want to come out and help me set it up. I will even make it worth your while. Dinner on me. I am sure you know more about these trail camera than I do. It probably goes without saying that it will have to be positioned in a location where the culprit can not get at it after they have been caught. However, I am very excited about the possibility of catching this person and even more excited about exacting revenge.

115 Inches of Pure Football Enjoyment

Saturday morning, I bought a new TV. My old TV is 12 years old and is starting to go. The old one is rear projection and recently whenever you turned it on, the lens were out of line and the easiest way to realign them was to use some physical persuasion. I had had enough so I went and bought a new one. Once I set up the new TV, I decided before putting the old one out to pasture, that I give it one more day of football. So here was my Saturday watching college football all day with 55 inches on the left and 60 on the right.

End of Deer Season and Soccer Picture

Sunday afternoon, I told my buddy, Jay, that I would help them with the deer they shot. I stopped out at my parent's house to grab a couple of knives and a hook. While I was there, I thought I would get you one more dumpster picture.Or how about just a bunch of deer heads laying around.When I got to Jay's parent's place this is what I saw when I walked in. You got it, they were carving up two deer on the dinner room table. My mom would never let me in the house again if I did something like this. But Jay's mom was right there, in fact helping out by wrapping everything.Once we finished up with the deer I stuck around to play some cards. And I got this picture of Jay's son, Henry, riding the dog.

Afterwards, I stopped to watch my sister-in-law, Julie, play soccer. Then they asked me to take a team photo. Here they are fresh off of a 10-0 victory.

Christmas Cards

I will be sending out an email, but in case you are a loyal blog reader and I don't have your email or mailing address. Send me an email with your mailing address to mitch_kumstean@yahoo.com and I will make sure I get a card out to you. While this isn't the best card, it will be better than last year's.

New Years Resolutions

This is becoming quite the tradition for me. Coming up with a New Resolution every year is almost as stressful as coming up with a Christmas Card picture. Every year I post my New Year’s Resolution, and with that I once again reinforce my past years’ resolutions. The list of resolutions is getting very long and distinguished (Topgun anyone?). But since some of my past resolutions have been food and alcohol related, I start a month early. This will keep me from eating poorly and drinking too much the entire month of December. So starting today, December 1st, I am starting my New Year’s Resolutions. But let’s review what resolutions I have had in the past and what I will be missing out on:
No Buffalo Wings (We just had some this past week and they were really good but now they are out of my diet)
No Fast Food (This is one that I have been really good about keeping. Since 2006 I have not had anything to eat from McDonalds, Taco Bell and only once while I was in Colorado, I had a breakfast sandwich from Burger King. Although this year, I am adding Culvers to the Fast Food category, but Gillies is not.)
No Candy (But I really love eating runts while at the movies.)
No Chips (Even Sun Chips? Yes, even Sun Chips.)
No Soda (So the large rootbeer at Oakland Gyros is out, but they still have milk shakes.)
No Cheese (That means no pizza, one of the main staples in my diet. How insane is this?)
No French Fries (What about American Fries?)
No Alcohol (This is the third year of the no alcohol resolution, and how about this, I can remember the exact events in which I broke this one. 2010 was the Badger Hockey game at Camp Randall (2/6/10). 2011 was Rebecca's birthday party (3/12/11)
No Swearing (Damn it. Alright starting now.)

Introducing myself to people I don't know. ("Eric Stratan, Rush Chairman, damn glad to meet you." Did I just swear again?")
No Eating after 7:00 p.m. (But when can I start eating?)
Juggle 15 minutes a day. (My goal is to have a much better performance that last year's pitiful display at the Freeman Party. Top trick to have down by the party, juggling 4 clubs. On and I will by purchasing knives this year. Ethan I am still working on chainsaws, maybe next year.)

Last year's resolution was not talking on the phone while driving. I was actually pretty good about that one. Normally I would just let the call go to voicemail, or if it seemed important, I pulled over to the side of the road. I did break this resolution a couple times, but it was definitely less than 10 times.

This is a very long list, 13 items I am watching myself on and hopefully making me a better person. With so many resolutions I decided this year to make an easy one for this year. This year my New Year's Resolution will be to rinse my mouth with mouthwash everytime I leave my house to go somewhere. Pretty easy and yet good for me. Plus when I will be introducing myself, it will only make a better impression that my breath smells fresh and minty. I encourage all of my blog readers to call me out on any and all of these resolutions. And if any of you have any resolutions, past or present, leave them as a comment, I would be interested to read them and / or possibly steal them from you.

Roller Skating

Saturday night we had a group that went rollerskating in Delavan. It is a really old skating rink. But it reminded me of the gymnasium that the movie "Carrie" was filmed in. What do you think?Here is Vanessa in action. They didn't have any races, but when it was an "All Skate Backwards Only" I dominated.Trinity, Angela and Al.Harper was certainly a handful.I told these two kids, that if they put their noses in my rollerblades for a minute that I would give them a dollar. I can't believe how easy it was to get them to do it. I thought it would be at least $5 a piece. And those things did not smell good.After skating we went to the bar across the street. We ended up playing bar dice. 7-14-21. I haven't played that in a long time. We eventually ordered what the bar was calling a "Mystery Shot". 4 of us had to do the shot, I would classify the taste as black licorice covered with red peppers. It was awful as you can tell from Al's expression.But I was delighted to find that this bar had Karyoke that same night. However, I can not just stand at the mic stand, I have to get out and mingle with my people when I perform.

Thanksgiving

This year was very special Thanksgiving for me. It wasn't because the Packers won. Or that we played the Turkey Bowl. It was special because I got to carve up the turkey. 38 years and I have never been asked to do the craving. And let's be honest here, I have more than enough experience wielding a knife. Although up until this Thanksgiving turkey, I had absolutely no experience cutting a bird.

Thanks for taking the picture Erin.

Turkey Bowl

Last year I tried to get a Thanksgiving Day Football Game together, but the weather was just too cold. This year however, the weather sort of cooperated and we had a game. Here are a couple of photos. Chucker getting ready to heave it. He proved after the game that he can throw a ball 58 yards.
Ethan and Carson going after the ball.Zach going out for a pass.We had four teams in a and one tournament just like college football should do. Team Kleppe (1st Place), Team Haus (2nd Place), Team Chucker (3rd Place) and Team Rickie. As I mentioned, Team Kleppe was the winner. Here they are. I guess that is what happens when you invite a former D1 quarterback to play football with you. Although I did think I was going to see Kleppe back of his claim of throwing a ball 60 yards, but that didn't happen. I want to thank everyone who came out to play. I hope everyone had a good time. The best idea of the day came from Will Perdue, who at the conclusion of the game said, "Hey, let's go to the bar for just one drink." An MVP was not awarded because as Kleppe stated, "It was a team effort". However, I would like to hand out the Sterling Sharpe award to Josh and Jacob, who both claimed after every play, "Uncle Rick, I was open!!!"