Hello World

(Those of you who are familiar with computer programming will be familiar with this title. For the benefit of everyone else, "Hello World" is the first program you ever write in a particular language.)

Many of you may know that I've been working on a nativity set like the one my grandma had made with us when I was little. It's a plastic canvas & yarn project, along with a few other little bells & whistles (none of which are actually bells, OR whistles). Since I was able to finish up this last week, Elissa decided to finally invite me as an author for our blog and have me write an entry in honor of the achievement. That's why there's no food yet.

As I was working on the project, Elissa made sure that we named all of the animals. Some of them aren't very imaginative, but for whatever reason, all of the sheep got European-sounding G names, like Gretchen, Gretel, Gertrude, etc. Also, I'm not sure why they're all girls, but that's ok, because the rest of the animals are 'obviously' boys. The kings posed a big challenge, because I think the craft world has changed what they sell since the pattern was designed. I was supposed to use beads to make little bottle-type things for them to hold, but I could only find sets of like 20 large beads for way more than I wanted to pay for them. So, we got creative and invented boxes for them to hold. We used the one the pattern provided, then decided to make an octagonal box and a treasure chest with a curved lid. We think they turned out nice. The other major change was that we changed the colors so that the men weren't stuck in pastels and pinks. Here's a picture:

We also went to the orchestra this last week -- the Austin Civic Orchestra. We found out about it from my boss, who plays violin for them. The concert was the 'Looney Tunes Greatest Hits' as he put it. We liked it though -- it had classics like "Where's the Beef" (okay, that's an official title), Beethoven's 5th, the 2001: A Space Odyssey opening theme, and more modern stuff like Harry Potter main theme, etc. For a non-profit group, they were excellent. We had a great time.