Wow: 40 years!

We were privileged to celebrate a momentous milestone with Fedora's dad this weekend. He's celebrating -- count them -- forty years of ministry with the 29th Avenue Baptist Church in San Francisco.

In our twitchy, Twitter-y culture, people have a hard time doing anything for forty weeks continuously, much less forty years. Hats off to Reverend Chin for a lifetime of steadfast and sacrificial ministry on behalf of our God.

See more pictures on Smugmug.

BFAM Christmas Party

 

This year's BFAM Christmas party had a more modest turnout that most years, but that meant more food and fun for the people who did come.  :-)

The kids enjoyed making their own fragrant smelling Christmas tree ornaments and eating Smarties along the way.  If you brought one of your child's ornaments home, make sure it's baked enough. Speaking from horrifying personal experience, if you leave too much moisture in them, they get furry -- and not in a good way.

See the whole gallery of pics on Smugug.

Another HP Friends and Family offer

If you haven't bought your holiday cards, Snapfish is offering HP friends and family (yes, this means you) 20 free photo cards if you buy more than 20.

So go forth and claim your photo cards.  Use discount code HPFRIENDS during checkout.

Tivo day

I declare today Tivo day.

Earlier this afternoon, I dropped by Tivo HQ in Alviso to participate in usability testing for a new feature they're working on (improved searching, essentially). It's fun to see new features under development, and they reward test subjects well. :-)

Also ran across this offer for a free Tivo cookie cutter for signing up to be on their mailing list (it's possibly you can even opt out of actually getting spammed, but I didn't try that). Get yours here.

Under the chairs

We were warming up to take an extended family pictures for Thanksgiving, and the kids decided that under the chair was more fun than on the chairs.  :-)

 

You can see the more rest of the shoot on my dad's Picasa Web Album.

Happy Thanksgiving

For a few years running now, we've enjoyed a vegetarian Thanksigiving dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the city called Ming's Diner. They serve surprisingly realistic (looking and tasting) renditions of mu-shu pork, walnut prawns, and even steamed fish with ginger.

Colin gave it a half thumb up, though that did not prevent him from eating at least half a dozen of a fried meat-substitute appetizer. Katye gave it two thumbs up, as did Cameron. Cameron insisted on using his mu shu wrapper as a hat and hand towel, though.

All in all, it was a good time, and we're thankful for the Tings who invited us.

 

 See more pics on Smugmug.

Cameron the clone trooper

My parents enjoyed seeing Cameron in his clone trooper costume, even without the helmet.

How bad is this stock market decline?

I saw this fabulous graph (well, the news that is graphs is terrifying, but the way the graph conveys the information is fabulous) on the Baseline Scenario , a blog about the financial crisis I started following a few weeks ago. 

It compares four bear markets in terms of both how far the markets dropped and how long the bear market lasted. This one is already the 2nd worst by percentage decline, but it's no Great Depression. Yet.

(Click the graph to see the bigger version.)