Danny's Five

Danny turned five today! Unfortunately, Danny got really sick last night, keeping himself and his parents up all night. So it wasn’t exactly the best of days for Danny, but he enjoyed opening with and playing his presents, and having his exhausted parents home with him for the day.

Danny will get a couple of extra opportuities to celebrate. He’ll be having a little party with his friends at daycare tomorrow, and going to Santa’s Village on Sunday. And he’ll have his party with his friends the first weekend that Karen has off in January. It’s amazing how much mileage kids get out of a single birthday these days.

The first snow of the season showed up late Sunday and continued through Monday night, dropping about nine or ten inches in our neck of the woods. I couldn’t make it into work, and spent the morning doing battle with our snow blower, a gift from our former neighbor.Tom Thompson.

It was my first time using a snow blower, but I managed okay. Got the driveway clean in the morning so that Karen could get off to work, and again in the afternoon. And I even came up with a good idea for clearing in the dark: I had Karen buy me a little head-mounted superbright LED flashlight to make up for the fact that the snow blower has no headlight and that most of the driveway is not lit.

And it worked okay until I ran out of gas and discovered that my gas can was empty. Oh well. I got enough done so that everyone could get out on Tuesday,.and that night I got the gas and fired up the snow blower. Things had gotten a bit icy, but I did a pretty good job and the head-mounted light worked great!

The new house is well underway, with footings, a septic system, and basement walls. We might even have this things framed and dry by Christmas.

I’m changing the front page of TheBrooksBunch.com so that I can easily show a little updated picture of the house, and a little snapshot from our daily adventures. I think I’’ve also come up with a neat little trick to allow me to display the first couple of lines from the blog on the main page as kind of a teaser, with a link to the blog itself. These changes should be showing up within a week or so.