A real wise guy

Here's a shot of the "living nativity scene" in which we participated the other night. I'm one of the wise men (the one who looks like he's holding a crockpot in his sleep) and R is, fittingly, the beautiful angel. Not pictured are the shepherds and some living animals. (The camel is a strange beast, clumsy and flatulent.) All in all it was a one of a kind experience.

Merry Christmas, everybody! I'll catch up with you again in 2009.

2008 holiday letter

Here's a copy of the holiday letter we recently sent out. If you've been following Midnight Toast / Jeblog for a while it won't be anything too exciting for you, but it makes for an easy post and maybe some of my newer readers can use this to get up to speed on my situation.

Jeff and R here, wishing all you dudes and dudettes a happy holiday. Please note our new address on the envelope if you haven't already recycled it. In June we left Delaware to make a new home in Santa Barbara, California!

And so we've begun to explore the west. Since the move we have visited LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Montaña De Oro State Park, and Zion National Park. There's still plenty more to see, and we plan to see it, but it can be hard to leave Santa Barbara. Our condo is located two miles from the beach and about the same from the mountains, making it very easy to get outside under the sunny skies for a hike, bike, or swim. Y’all should stop by for a visit. We have a guest room ready for you.

R was transferred here by DuPont to research and develop the future of display technology: Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs). It's an exciting business and technology to be involved in, and R enjoys the challenges it brings. She also finds time for yoga, kickboxing, ceramics, and sampling new restaurants. One of her goals for 2009 is to try surfing!

Jeff was able to keep his job after the move and work out of the new house, making for an easy commute and the freedom to stay in his bathrobe all day. The software company he worked for was purchased by the massive Oracle Corporation this year and the transition has kept him on his toes… but he still manages to have at least one video project underway at all times too. Oh, and Jeff started skateboarding this year.

We will also remember 2008 for the two weeks in February we spent in New Zealand. This trip had us climbing on glaciers, hiking in rain forests, jumping off cliffs, kayaking through fjords, swimming with eels... it was an adventurous tour through an extraordinarily beautiful country. We feel so lucky to have had these opportunities to explore the world. You betcha.

The best gift of Christmas is sharing our lives with friends and family, in spirit if not always in person. We hope this holiday brings you peace, love, and joy into 2009.

Shooting the moon

I dusted off the video camera to take some footage of the full moon last week. It will be used in the music video I'm cobbling together, although not the shot you see above because the video is supposed to take place in Wilmington and you won't find any palm trees there.

So it turns out I'm finding time to work on my video this month after all. I'm feeling better about my "to do" list now that I've had the chance to dive into it. My Christmas shopping is out of the way for the most part. Our holiday letter is written and just waiting to be printed, enveloped, and dropped in the mail. I do have a big project to finish up this week at work, but it will get done one way or another. There has been much to do, but perhaps I underestimated the amount of free time I would have in which to do it. Having the nights and weekends open has certainly helped.

We weren't planning to get a Christmas tree this year because the season was speeding along so fast and, as usual, we'll be out of town for the actual holiday, but we broke down and got a tree anyway. It is now fully decorated too, furthering our immersion in the Christmas spirit. We also attended Handel's Messiah in concert at the Granada last weekend to help us get there. This is the musical piece that contains the famous "Hallelujah" chorus that has been spoofed so often in pop culture. It was great to hear it in it's original context for a change.

Also on the entertainment scene, we saw/heard our favorite local band, Threadspinner, perform at a little place down the street. We went out to the movie Slumdog Millionaire and watched Tropic Thunder from our couch. Slumdog was good but not everything I had hoped for. I fell asleep during Thunder. I haven't seen too many movies this year, so I'm glad we're making a last minute effort to catch up. The Dark Knight is probably still my favorite from 2008, but I have high hopes that something else will blow me away before the Oscars arrive. Nobody wants to say the most popular movie of the year was also their favorite.

Dream beneath a desert sky

Whew. December is off to a busy start. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with work and with life in general right now. Don't expect much blogging from me this month because there are so many other things to finish up before the holidays. I wouldn't be surprised if I don't even touch my video project this month, which is a bummer since I'm getting so dang excited to share it with you.

At least the next few weekends are looking relatively uneventful. Last weekend was sort of our final hurrah before we buckle down and face the weeks before our Christmas vacation in Minnesota. We drove out to Las Vegas to spend Thanksgiving with my grandparents and then up to Zion National Park in Utah for some hiking and camping. If you've been following me on Twitter, Facebook, or email, then this is probably not news to you, but I feel the need to document it here anyway simply because it was such a wonderful extended weekend.

It was pouring rain when we left last Wednesday morning. We cruised across the desert in an unexpected fog, arriving on my grandparents’ place mid afternoon. That evening the four of us hit a buffet, where I showed great restraint and managed to avoid getting the hiccups! It occurred to me while I was there that the first time I ever got what I call the "Killer Hiccups" was after eating at a buffet during my last visit to Vegas (I was thirteen or fourteen at the time). At the wise old age of 29 I finally overcame them by simply not eating so much. I wanted to stay at the top of my game when it came to playing computerized BINGO. That's right -- they have machines that do all of the work for you now. The numbers are still read aloud, but there’s no need to daub cards with ink anymore. Your only responsibility as a player is to yell the word when the machine tells you that you won. So in our case, we had no responsibility at all. Oh well, it was fun to get an inside perspective of my grandparents' night life. They appear to be some sort of BINGO royalty at Boulder Station.

The next day was Thanksgiving. My grandma made a turkey and all of the fixings, and it was very tasty. I was glad to be with family after spending the holiday alone last year. After dinner and some good old-fashioned relaxing, R and I went off to explore the city. This was her first time seeing The Strip and it had been 15 years for me. The place has changed a lot and so has my perspective. We walked a long way, in and out of casinos, stopping in a few shops and for a drink in the Eiffel Tower. Of course we had a good time, but after seeing this town that is all surface we couldn’t help but appreciate the real Eiffel Tower or the real New York City or the real Michelangelo’s paintings more. Maybe that’s the point of Vegas. The façade itself is impressive, but it leaves me with a sleazy, empty feeling. It's a good place for wild night life, but as you all must know, that's not really what I'm looking for.

We got up on Friday and drove northeast to Zion National Park in Utah. Ideally we would have had enough time to see Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon as well, but Zion was plenty for two days. It’s quite a spectacular place, a deep canyon carved out of sandstone. Camping was cold, but we had a couple of fires and bundled ourselves up pretty well inside our sleeping bags. We took three separate hikes, the highlight of which involved following a narrow spine with 1500 foot cliffs on both sides to Angels Landing. It was a little daring and quite outstanding. We really fell in love with the park. The only disappointing aspect was high volume of people present over the long weekend. It’s hard to revel in the glory of a landscape when there are screaming kids on the trail ahead of you or a big group of people rushing you out of the way so they can get a photo in front of the vista on which you are gazing.

Check out our photo gallery from the trip. We took 350 shots, kept 150, and posted 80. Many of the shots were scrapped because the light had either too harsh a contrast or was too dim. An improperly exposed sky or a little unwanted blur is sometimes (but not always) enough for me to hit the delete button. But I guess it works out because if I posted a gallery of more than 80 photos, it would be too overwhelming for anyone to view entirely anyway. If I made you wade through a bunch of garbage, you'd surely miss the few decent shots. That's the value of editing.