Family photos 2024

You may have received our Christmas card, which features a few of these, but I wanted to post them here too. All credit goes to local photographer Gretchen Loretta. She did an amazing job! It's even more impressive when I tell you these were taken on a windy, rainy, chilly day.

 

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Shrek The Musical Jr.

Veronica made her Minneapolis debut at The Conn Theater on Nicollet Ave with 18 performances of Shrek over three weekends (and some school days). It was a very entertaining show with a small but incredibly talented cast, ages 10-20. Her role was the Wicked Witch, but she also sang and danced a bunch in the ensemble. She is such a hard worker, learning new skills for her parts (baton twirling and more advanced tap dancing this time), even powering through multiple shows a day when she was sick (the show must go on). I'm hoping we will get some professional photos of actors on stage that I can post eventually, but for now I only have a few snaps from the lobby afterwards. 

Here is her selfie with grandmas Linda and Sofia:

And one with my parents from last Friday.

Grandpa Rak and Uncle Nathan also made to performances, along with other friends and supporters. Thanks to everyone who made it out!

Brava, my darling girl!

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Omri on keys

Omri gave Grandpa a preview of the song he would be playing at his piano recital:

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Decorating the tree 2024

These are a little disappointing compared to previous years because I have been having an issue with my big camera and wasn't able to use it! I also can't seem to take a decent shot with my iPhone these days either (I think because of the auto-HDR that can no longer be turned off?). Anyway, here's what I got:

Nice job, team!

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Alice turns 2

The day after Thanksgiving was Alice's birthday, so we stopped by to wish her a happy one. She was happy alright!

 

Salvi got a belated birthday gift too:

Alice, having her hair done again:

The gamer guyz had other things on their mind:

Ezra made an appearance too:

That's about it from our one-night trip up north. It was a lot of driving but nice to see family!

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Thanksgiving 2024

Had a marvelous dinner at Mike and Sofia's house this year! Thank you to our hosts!

I neglected to take a group photo, but R's sister's family was in attendance. Alice kind of stole the show this year with her adorableness (she's also one of the few people I know who seems to like to have her photo taken anymore, so we got along well).

 

She really took a liking to her big girl cousin, Veronica, who is doing her hair here:

Mauro and R performed Adam Sandler's "The Thanksgiving Song" (which I have on video, just not permission to share):

And this is neither here nor there, just a shot of Veronica browsing Mike's music shelf earlier in the day:

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Philly 2024

I was in Philadelphia last week for my company's 30th anniversary celebration.

 

The event itself was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Rocky famously ran up the stairs.

My team at the photo booth:

A photo from my walk through City Hall and a pre-party mirror selfie:

I had a corner room on the 22nd floor. This was part of my view:

Grabbing a cheese steak AFTER the after-party:

 I had a good time!

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Lego Challenge

Omri is in a Lego robotics league. He has been meeting with his team twice a week this fall, and they had their first competition last weekend. It was an interesting and fun experience!

 

The kids built and programmed a robot to perform certain tasks and earn points during timed matches.

Their robot:

The Krakens also presented a research assignment about cleaning up rivers in front of a panel of judges.

They won a Breakthrough Award for their novel approach and their design of this model of the filtering equipment:

Not bad for their first year as a club!

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WBLUMC exhibition #2

I had another gallery of photos on display at our church for a couple of months this fall. I treated it as a brighter but less-thematically cohesive supplement to my previous gallery that appeared for a limited time just prior to the pandemic. 

Omri snapped this one of me in front of a few of the 13 selections:

It was fun to share some of my work again and to hopefully spur some discussion in the hallways.

It doesn't appear in the captures above, but the centerpiece of my gallery was my rejected state fair submission.

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Just a weekend

It was a busy weekend, which has become kind of a typical of weekends these days. 

The first part was unusual, however: I went out to a concert at First Ave with a friend. The band was Minneapolis supergroup Golden Smog. Here you can see the frontman from The Jayhawks with a special guest from the Cactus Blossoms:

Veronica had two dance lessons, a voice lesson, and confirmation class. Omri had a Lego Club meeting. There was a lot of time spent in the car.

In the afternoon, we kicked off our holiday season with a performance of How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the Children's Theater. It was a fun show!

Selfie from the balcony. We also went out to dinner after the show.

On Sunday we went to church, got groceries, did laundry, and raked a ton of leaves.

So that's pretty much it. I just thought it would be fun to document a weekend since I had decent photo coverage from it.

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Cardboard racetrack 3.0

This is one of my very most favorite projects I have ever worked on. It's every bit as personal to me as the short film I made with Veronica. This is my and Omri's "cardboard racetrack."

 

It's really more of a parking ramp than a racetrack (the name was carried over from an earlier version that included a long spiraling track). Throwing that old one into the recycling bin was heartbreaking for me. We had had so much fun building it, that we made the decision to start over on a new one.

We spent many Saturday mornings and evenings after dinner having some "analog time," spinning records and putting this thing together. It is true that I did most of the cutting and gluing while Omri mostly played alongside me, but he was always willing to discuss the plans with me and hold things in place. He also built the part of the structure known as "Omri's apartment" by himself.

The sad part is that the structure is not complete. We sort of stopped working on it two years ago when Omri became less interested in playing with cars and when we realized it was inevitable that we wouldn't be able to keep this one forever either. As much as we enjoyed the construction process, we didn't want to put more time into something that was inevitably going to need to be dismantled or given away.

The whole thing sits over the Hot Wheels Criss-Cross Crash racetrack. We always meant to integrate the two pieces, so that you could drive from the ramp onto the track, but that section was going to take up even more space, so we never got around to it.

We were very proud of our real working elevator that could take a car from the top level to the bottom level in 4.5 turns of a crank:

Another angle:

More details:

Plenty of parking spaces:

Bird's eye view:

We are looking for a new home for this extremely fun playset. Let me know if anybody out there is interested. We can offer some recommendations for new enhancements/extensions too.

This is a video in which we take you on a tour:

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