Sorry for the interruption but I was out of town for most of the holiday (we left the 26th for Chicago, but thats a whole post on its own!). I did however, want to brag about some of the Christmas Gifts that blessed our house this season though.

Amy’s big gift this year is to have the Master Bath and Bedroom repainted. When we bought the house from her parents, we inherited the DEEP red color of the bath and bed room. Its a dark red (think maroon) that is hard to match colors with. Now we’re going for a lighter, beachier look and are painting them Beachnut (its a lowes color). The master bath is done (Amy found some Votive candle holders at a store in Nashville), next on to the bedroom!

Grace had a very Hannah Montanna Christmas. She got a Hannah Montanna Guitar Game (like Guitar Hero) that plugs in to the tv, a Hannah Costume, and doll. Its pretty cool and she likes pretending to be a rockstar. Maybe someday. I like playing her game (since I haven’t bought Guitar HEro World Tour yet) and she’s getting better at it.

Mose got a Trampoline. One of her favorite things to do is jump. We’d wake on Saturday mornings to the heavy thud of emma jumping up and down in our door way. Now she can do it all she wants and it doesn’t make the house shake. Its pretty cool and Grace and Emma take turns on it. Amy wanted to try it out, but its for people under 80 pounds (and neither of us meet that requirement!

The girls also got some tinkertoys, and some other little odds and ends that they like to play with, but the coolest by far is my Ultimate Wall-E Robot.

We saw the movie in the theaters and we’re big fans (mose loves him). We had seen the Ultimate Wall-e at the Disney Store but we weren’t going to get him because of the price tag. Needless to say, Santa found him on Sale and he was wrapped and under the tree for me on Christmas morning. He has fun dancing, chasing the dogs around and just exploring on his own. If you haven’t seen one yet, I’ll work on some video and see if I can get anything posted. Its pretty cool though and the way he can respond to voice commands or find his own way around the room is fairly smooth.

Was there one gift that you prized more than the others??

I’ve developed a free, widget ready (I think) theme for WordPress thats based of a site redesign I was working on for another site. I’ve decided not to use the design for that site and thought it appropriate to make it a cool WordPress 2.3.2 theme.

The site is a two column layout with a footer area. The header automatically pulls the tags for your posts and creates meta tags out of them. You need to EDIT the header.php file and change the commonmeta tags to something more fitting for your site:

$commonmeta = "delusions,reviews,politics,family,ramblings,bloggin,money";


Please feel free to use this theme as you feel fit, I only ask that you keep the information in the footer linking back to this site.

DEMO

Downloaded a total of 3 times

I’m not a huge college (or even pro for that matter) football fan, yet for the past several years I’ve found myself sitting high above the crowd at the Georgia Dome for the Peach (come Chick-Fli-A) bowl on New Years Eve. Its one of the “perks” of doing pyro in the Atlanta area. Indoor pyro is a totally different beast than a larger outdoor show. Often times the work is harder on the indoor than the outdoor show for a couple of reasons I won’t go in to but I’ve decided I rather prefer outdoor displays to indoor stuff.

Last year’s game was ok as Georgia was playing in the bowl game. This year was cool as I could sit there and yell go Tigers and it didn’t matter who had possession of the ball. Not to mention it but the sea of Orange that encircled the dome was amazing as well (both Auburn and Clemson have orange as their color). It was actually a good game as well and a packed house (I looked around the dome from my perch at the top and was unable to find more than a dozen empty seats at kickoff!). Going by the stats, Auburn deserved to win. They had possession longer, they threw for more yards and had more first downs than Clemson, but Clemson wasn’t going to give up with out a fight.

The game ended regulation play at 17 -17 and for the first time in the bowl’s 40 year history, it went in to over time. Clemson took the lead on field goal but Auburn answered back with a TD to win the game. It ended up being a rather exciting match and both teams were pretty evenly paired up. Its hard to not get drawn in to the excitement of the game in that atmosphere.

Anywho, my job through out the game was to sit in the upper observation booth on the Auburn (home team) endzone and fire off four shots whenever a team scored. Pretty easy and a little boring. Not to mention that I had been sitting up there since about 4:30pm that afternoon and had spent all but maybe two hours of my day up there. New Years came and went with a flourish as we heard the rockets going off outside the dome, we were too concerned with breaking down the gear (we had to pull our cables out of a mess of fiber optic cables) so we could head home. By the time my head hit the pillow at 3am, I had been going for about 21 hours solid. In the pyro business, we’re often the first in and the last out at an event. All in all it was fun but one year, I’d like to be asleep in my bed before the new year rolls in.

How’d you spend your new years eve??

Rare is it to find a good bluegrass band with an amazing sound thats light on the strings. However, The Greencards have managed to put together a sound thats fun to listen to while combining some of the coolest strings around. Listen closely to the guitar and mandolin, you’ll be taken away. Hey, can I have your tots??