I still don't understand how this could happen...

Mrs. BigKat was at the computer this morning. It was a little cold so she was tapping her feet up and down on the floor.

BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM...

Now what would you say in that situation? I bet you would say exactly the same thing that I said:

Her feet: BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM

Me: FLASH!!! A-aaaaaahhhh!!!

Savior of the universe!!!

And it would be funny, right? WRONG! Mrs. BigKat had NO IDEA what I was talking about! SHE HAD NEVER HEARD OF FLASH GORDON!

I still don't know what to say about this...

Here's the song in case you spent your childhood in a hole in the ground like my wife apparently did:

GPS

I need this:

Round-abound...hehe

According to this slickdeal, you can get a TomTom GPS for $89. Too bad we already have a Garmin or I would've bought one for sure.

In my Sunday School class, I've been making movies to help illustrate our lessons. Over the past few weeks, we've been studying Acts. Acts is great because it talks about God's AMAZING, UNSTOPPABLE power. God had a plan to have the Good News about His Son Jesus spread all over the place and nothing could stop it!

Here are a couple of movies that we've watched that help illustrate what we've been learning. I use LilKat1's legos to make the movies. This first video talks about God's amazing power to change lives.

This second video talks about how nothing can stop the power of God.

These videos have been working out great in class. The kids love them, and they help reinforce the lessons that we've been learning about God and the Bible.

Bullitt

We watched Bullitt last night. Here's the famous car chase scene. Who would've guessed that San Fransisco had so many green VW bugs? When the first bug came up (around 3:20 on the youtube clip), I pointed it out to Mrs. BigKat. The next 3 made her laugh.

Only the Warriors...

This happened in the Warriors/Blazers game last night. The Warriors ran out of guys and ended up having to put injured guys in the game so that they'd have enough players. Stefen Curry and Monta Ellis played all 48 minutes. So did 2 D-League guys. Chris Hunter (another D-League guy) started, but then got hurt early. So Devean George (remember him?) played the rest of the game.

The worst part about it is that the ended up winning! Now, instead of being tied for the 3rd worst record, they're tied for the 4th. This reduces their chances of winning the draft lottery by about 4% I think. They can't even lose properly!

Stir Crazy

I have always loved popcorn. I could probably eat popcorn every day. But I'm not a big fan of microwave popcorn. I like the convenience, but don't care for the taste so much. For a few years now, my popcorn popping method of choice looked something like this. I would get out my stainless steel bowl, add some popcorn, oil, and salt, cover the whole thing with foil, and jiggle it over the stove for 3 minutes. Simple, tasty, but kind of a pain.

For Christmas, my mom gave us a Stir Crazy

popcorn popper. I love it! Instead of me jiggling the popcorn around, there's a metal stick that does it for me. And there's no need to get out the aluminum foil or my Nomex gloves or anything else. There's even a place at the top where you put your butter.

The steam escaping from the popcorn melts the butter. The melted butter drips into the bowl and spreads evenly around all the popcorn. So you no longer have to have sections of dry popcorn and sections of wilted, butter-saturated popcorn. I believe that I will never eat popcorn in my house again that does not come out of a Stir Crazy.

Want to know another reason why the Stir Crazy is so cool? Each week, I roast coffee beans for Mrs. BigKat. My coffee roasting method is really quite similar to my old popcorn popping method. Except instead of jiggling the bowl, I stir the beans with a stick. And instead of doing it on a stove, I use a heat gun. And during the winter, instead of hanging out inside a nice warm house, I will have to sit outside freezing my bottom off for 15 minutes. Well, if the Stir Crazy can help me make popcorn, do you think it can help me roast coffee? Apparently so!

Some people have taken a Stir Crazy and combine it with a Turbo Oven (a small 'As Seen On TV', Set-It-And-Forget-It style convection oven) and made a home roasting rig out of it. The Stir Crazy stirs the beans and the Turbo Oven provides the heat (I believe that most people disconnect the Stir Crazy heating element). And from what I've seen, it seems to work pretty well! Now, I'm certainly not going to dismantle my new favorite popcorn popper, just to make coffee roasting easier. So my next job is to scour some thrift stores and see if I can find these 2 units for cheap. Then my days of sitting in out in the cold rain, huddled over warm bowl of coffee beans, while stirring like a madman will be over.

If you want to see a video of the Stir Crazy/Turbo Oven (or the SCTO to coffee geeks), you can check one out here. Notice his awesome cooling rig too. That's next on my list...

Advent

Wow...it's been busy around here lately. I started a new basketball clinic for kids at our church. It's kind of a pilot program right now. It's a small 4 week session made up of kids from my Sunday School class and around the neighborhood. In January, I'm planning on doing a larger session that's open to everyone else. So that's one thing keeping us busy. But we've also got ADVENT!

A couple of Christmas's ago, we started doing a new thing where we give our kids almost all of their Christmas presents before Christmas. The idea is that getting the presents out of the way will make it easier for us to truly celebrate Jesus' birthday. And it's been working great for the past 2 years! I like it because less importance is placed on the presents. The kids like it because they get their presents early. (Mrs. BigKat is not as thrilled about the new system as I am, but she does see the need for it and enjoys the fact that it's working so well.)

Anyhow, at church, they asked us, as a family, to light the Advent candle this Sunday. And my job is to tell about our family traditions that help us keep Jesus as the focus of Christmas. Now everyone at church will get to hear about my crazy idea!

There's another Advent activity that LilKat1 and I are doing. It's actually something that I'm doing with my Sunday School class. We're doing an Advent Calendar, but it's a little different than your normal Advent calendar. You know the calendars where you open up the doors and eat the little chocolates (or get Legos or whatever)? Well, instead of getting things, we're giving things. Each day leading up to Christmas, we're giving a gift of service to Jesus. On our calendar, we write down something we can do to share God's love with someone else for each day of the month. Then, as we give our gifts of service, we draw hearts around whatever day it is to mark down what we did. For example, one day LilKat1 spent some time with his sister playing her favorite game. Another day, he emailed his favorite Bible verse to his grandmother. Another time, he helped make cookies, which we sold to help raise money to buy blankets for poor people in India to help them stay warm during the winter. So on Sunday, I'll be able to talk about our Advent Calendar too!

Here's a little video I made for my Sunday School class to illustrate the idea:

Sunday School Video #2

This is the video I did this week for Sunday School. The kids enjoyed this one quite a bit. I enjoy these videos because they are reminiscent of the puppet shows that I used to do in class. Those puppet shows were great. The kids LOVED them. Even the grownups liked them. Our youth pastor would actually try to make time to be in our class when we were doing the puppet shows so that he could watch. They were one of the main highlights of the class.

But then my puppet show partner went to a different class, and I couldn't do them anymore with her. Mrs. BigKat filled in and did them with me for a year after that. But then she started helping out with the littler kids. I didn't have a partner anymore, so we had no more puppet shows.

For the past couple of years, I've been trying to think of a way to bring them back. I remembered a friend of mine doing a video for a class in high school using his GI Joes and Star Wars figures. I figured that with my new Vado, it would be fairly easy to get a set of toy-based videos like that done. I'm hoping that I can put these out every week or two for the kids. Now that soccer season is over, I have a bit more free time (and energy) to do stuff like this.

Here's the video:

Sunday School Video

Today at Sunday School, I'm teaching about Joseph. We're learning about how, no matter what happened to Joseph, God was with him. Even though Joseph went through all sorts of bad times, God was able to use them for His good purposes. To help illustrate how God can make great things happen from our bad situations, I made a little video using some of LilKat1's toys. I'm showing it in class this morning. I hope the kids like it!

Here it is:

Vado HD

A little while ago, I saw the Creative Vado HD go on sale for $99, so I picked one up. It's a compact video camera that fits in your pocket and records HD video. I've been wanting something like this to carry around with me when I'm out with the kids. I don't always want to lug around my standard video camera when we go to the park or the beach or the zoo. I want to be able to capture all the fun, cute, spontaneous kid moments that pop up all the time and be able to easily share them with my friends and family.

I knew there would be a couple of downsides. First of all, there's no image stabilization, so if you don't hold your hand steady, things can get a little shaky. Another downside is that there's no zoom. I considered waiting to see if the price would drop on something like the Canon Powershot 780IS (a fancy point and shoot camera that does HD video and has image stabilization). But since my main priority was to get something that was super-easy to shoot and share video with (and pay under $100), the Vado HD won out.

Turns out it works quite well! The video quality is quite nice, better than my old (non-HD) camcorder. The image stabilization isn't too big of a problem since I'm just taking family movies. I like being able to plug the Vado into the HDMI port on our tv and watch videos right away. And the software installed on the Vado for uploading to Youtube and Photobucket is very convenient.

Here's a video that I made while playing around with it. It's a tour of my home office and boardgame collection.

Pizza Videos

I think we're having pizza night on Friday. Seems like a good opportunity to try to beat this guy's record:

I also saw this video. Nice to know that if I ever get lost in the woods, I'll be able to survive on pizza instead of having to eat bugs or something.

Too Late

I just saw a video of this dice rolling machine:

It's 7 feet tall and can roll 1.3 million dice per day. It has a computer that takes images of the dice to figure out what was rolled. 

My birthday was last Sunday. I'm a little sad because if I had seen the video sooner, I could've asked for one. But now it's too late...

Escalator

ummm...you're kind of going the wrong...

I mean...you're not actually supposed to go...

Nevermind...go ahead and do it your way...

Games for Date Night

My wife and I go out on a 'Date Night' every week. It's something that we both look forward to quite a bit. Just some nice time for ourselves with no kids. One of the things that we like to do on Date Night is to go somewhere quiet and play a quick board game together. Here's a video I made that talks about some games that we like to play when we go out:

If you want to find out more about the games I talked about, here are some links for you:

Hive

Battle for Hill 218

Mystery Rummy: Jekyll & Hyde

Lost Cities

Glory to Rome

Race for the Galaxy

I'm sure that there are tons of other games that would be great for Date Night, or could be easily modified to bring on Date Night. I just wanted to throw this idea out there because it's something that both my wife and I have a lot of fun doing. Yeah, we play board games at home all the time. But for some reason, playing somewhere that's not your house every once in a while is just kind of fun!

Videos

This is a cartoon made by a friend of mine from high school. It's called 'The Infinite Goliath'. It's about a super-powerful space villain that has been captured, paroled, and forced to live in the suburbs. I thought it was pretty funny:

Here's a clip of a deleted scene from the original Star Wars movie that I'd never seen. Too bad they didn't leave it in.

Even I have my limits

So  I own a bunch of boardgames. I have a room dedicated to boardgames. I own boardgames of many different kinds. I have purchased almost all of my boardgames without having seen (in person) or played them first. Sometimes, I'll buy a boardgame just because it seems like a good deal. I've even bought a boardgame knowing that it probably won't get played very much, but it might be a good idea to have for when the kids are older. I buy a lot of boardgames.

But even I have my limits...

I

I don't think I'm going to be getting this game anytime soon. It's a little too...silly. I didn't think that was possible, but, apparently, it is.

How'd I miss this?

From Rick Reilly:

"Why is nobody talking about Antrel Rolle!" All he did was lose the Super Bowl for the Cardinals! Rolle, the Cardinals' safety, was on the sideline at the end of the first half when Steelers linebacker James Harrison intercepted Kurt Warner at the goal line and began his unthinkable 100-yard touchdown rumble. That was a 14-point swing for the Steelers and turned the game. But Cards' wide receiverLarry Fitzgerald was close to catching Harrison at the 30 when he ran smack into Rolle, who had stepped onto the field go get a good look at Harrison going past. Fitzgerald slammed into Rolle, pushed him out of the way, had to start over and didn't get to Harrison again until the goal line, when it was too late

Did this really happen? I've long since deleted the SuperBowl from my tivo, so I had to go to YouTube...

Wow...

Harrison barely made that touchdown. If Rolle stays off the field and Fitzgerald doesn't run into him...

CURSE YOU ANTREL ROLLE!!!

Ingenious

Here's an introduction to another tile-laying game: Ingenious.

This is actually one of my favorite games. It's a great game to play with people who are new to boardgaming. I even taught my dad to play this!




It may be hard to notice, but you might be able to tell that my box top is slightly damaged. I bought this game as a 'Ding and Dent' game from an online retailer. Several online retailers sell games with damaged boxes at a slight discount. So if you don't care about what your box looks like, 'Ding and Dent' games are an option that can save you a little bit of money.

Wasabi!

Ok, maybe I'm starting to have a little too much fun with these boardgame videos...

Now I own several racing games. I own a few detective games. I have a whole bunch of train games. But I only have one game about sushi making -Wasabi!

Here's a short video introduction to the game. Keep in mind that there are a lot of rules that I don't go over. I just wanted to introduce the game and give you a brief overview of what it's about. It really is one of the more unique games in my collection, and it's definitely near the top of the list as far as nice looking games. If you're interested in finding out more details, there's a lot more information at Board Game Geek.

Anyhow, enjoy the video!

Worm Up!

Recently, Eagle Games had a nice sale and I was able to get a big stack of games for not a whole lot of money (7 games for just over $70! Woo hoo!). One of the games I got was Worm Up! I had never heard of this game before, so I did some research on it. It actually looked really fun, so I picked it up.

Good call by me! We played it last night loved it.

Here's a short video I made so you can see what the game is like:



I forgot to mention one important rule. The lower numbers get to move before the higher numbers. So if you play a 4, you don't get to move as far as someone who played a 7, but since you're moving first, you get first shot at cutting them off.

Anyhow, like I said, I've only played this game one time, but I think it's great. It's fun, it's silly, and it plays really fast. It won't be a 'Main Event' type game at your game night, but it's definitely a great warm-up act.

(By the way, Eagle Games still has several games on sale. They also have free shipping if you purchase over $70. Not a huge selection, but you could get some good deals if they have what you're looking for.)