Brandon Notices

I just enjoyed a lunch of fish and chips at the Ivar's restaurant here in Lynnwood. I was excited to see how much Christmas decoration they had put up around the restaurant. Twinkling Christmas lights bordered the roof and ran along the front counter. Big, shiny Christmas present boxes were arranged on the counter and between booths. Thick, red ribbons spiraled up the structural columns, reminiscent of candy canes. And, here in this picture, you can see the ribbons tied in a similar manner on the ceiling lamps, complete with big red bows.

I'm impressed not only that Ivar's has tremendous Christmas spirit, but I'm also impressed with the amount of work they went though to achieve this decoration. Those lamps are high. And there are at least a dozen of them these lights in the restaurant. The employees must have visited each lamp with a ladder. I applaud Ivar's for going to such lengths to make their restaurant warm, inviting, and festive for Christmas.

A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of my favorite cartoon Christmas specials. I was excited to see a hardcover book version by Hallmark at Bartell Drugs today.

Inside, I saw something that amazed me. Peppermint Patty and Marcie have joined the fun! Peppermint Patty might be my favorite Peanuts character.

The Christmas special originally aired on December 9, 1965, but Peppermint Patty wasn't introduced until August 22, 1966. Since then, she has become an important Peanuts character, with important roles in the Thanksgiving and Easter specials. In Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown, she arguably has a more important role than even Lucy, as she appoints herself the leader of the girls' rafting team.

Some may complain that adding characters to a holiday classic will taint the story and its tradition. They might object especially to the decision to give Peppermint Patty spoken lines in the story. But I like Peppermint Patty, so shut up. I find the idea of Charlie Brown and his friends celebrating Christmas without Peppermint Patty and Marcie to be rather unrealistic in this day and age, given all the things they've been through together. It would be sad to leave them out.

This isn't the first time that Peppermint Patty's been put into this story, though. There's this picture which I know I've seen somewhere before. I can't place where I've seen it, though. There's also this puzzle, which I bought on sale last January.

Christmas tree + diffraction grating + boredom

Look what I made!



It is a scene of Linus, Lucy, Sally, Snoopy, and Woodstock gathering around a Christmas tree. Lucy wants to put the star on the tree, but Woodstock is already sitting on top. It looks like Linus wants to hand Woodstock a Christmas card.


The pages are laid out, not even taped together yet.

The poster is made of thirty sheets of paper, taped together to fit the size of my window, which is about 34″ × 59″. There is a reason why the picture looks off-center: the frame between the sashes blocks part of the picture. If I had centered the picture in the window, the tree and Woodstock would be blocked behind it. This would look bad.

The hard part was coloring. I could have printed the pages in color, but I decided to go with the coloring book style because I was worried that color ink would run if it touched condensation on the window. Crayons are small, and I had a lot to color, but I think it'll be safer this way.

With the lights on inside, the poster is illuminated for outdoor viewers. In the daytime, I hope the sunlight will pass through the poster so that the image can be seen from inside.

I got the picture design from a paper Christmas decoration I found in a Christmas decoration bin. I scanned the picture so that I could use it as my desktop wallpaper.


The original decoration, about a foot wide.


Here is the poster, seen from inside my room.

I found the Charlie Brown popcorn tin! It was $4.88 at the Mukilteo Rite Aid. This is awesome!



The tin has two scenes. The first is Charlie hanging the red ornament on his scraggly tree. This is moments before his Christmas is temporarily ruined.



The other side has all the kids gathered happily around the tree. This picture is very faithful to the original scene—the tree is decorated the same, and the kids are all arranged the same way

I saw this on the X-Entertainment Blog today. It's one a popcorn tin sectioned into three flavors. I like eating popcorn (especially the cheese-flavored popcorn—the caramel, not so much), and these popcorn tins are great to have around during the Christmas season. What's even better is that it has a scene from the Charlie Brown Christmas on it! I have to get one of these.

I think I'm going crazy. I spent a lot of time obsessing about stacking up presents on the table behind the couch. It's difficult work—you can't put heavy presents on top of presents that are light and flimsy, and you can't put anything on top of a present that has a bow on top (lest you would crush a bow). And now I have spent fifteen minutes taking a picture, editing that picture, typing this description, uploading the picture, and posting it for you to read here. Also, it's two in the morning.

We got the Christmas tree up this weekend, and with it, a plethora of Christmas tree ornaments. I think I'll fill you in on some of the coolest ornaments hanging out on the tree this year.

This is Mr. S'moresman. It's like a snowman, except he is made out of marshmallows. Note also the chocolate and the graham cracker he is standing on. This is without a doubt the sweetest-looking of all the ornaments on the tree this year. I feel like drowning him in a hot cup of cocoa. I found it at the University Book Store, but I think I've seen it and others like it somewhere else.

I got this ornament last December at Cost Plus. (There's nothing I like there except for their Jelly Belly selection.) It expresses my love for Jelly Belly's jelly beans. I also got three other colors as Christmas presents. Each came with a package of jelly beans of the same color. I didn't see any Jelly Belly ornaments at Cost Plus this year, but they have Christmas jelly bean mix 10% cheaper than anywhere else I've seen them.

While I was taking pictures, Garth decided to walk over and start meowing. Garth likes it when we have the tree up. We don't have the tree skirt out of the garage yet, but he likes to lie down on it, under the tree, out of our reach. In this picture, I think he is trying to pick his nose with the tree.

Here's two ornaments that I like a lot. On the left, we've got the apple. Actually, this is one of about a dozen apples that populate the tree. I don't know why I like them, but I wouldn't have a Christmas tree without them.

On the right, we have Snoopy dressed up as a charity Santa. This was actually designed as a clip-on bag decoration or something, but I thought it would look good on the tree. It came in a set including other figures like Charlie, Lucy, Linus, and Franklin, as well as little props like Charlie's loserly Christmas tree. (Oddly, the set came with Schroeder's piano, but no Schroeder.)

Stephanie got this one last year, I believe. It's Santa, and he's covered in sparkly glitter! This one looks really good on the tree because he's sparkly and glittery.

Okay, that's all the ornaments I feel like typing about.

Can you believe that Lowe's already has Christmas stuff out? I guess it's not that surprising, but some of the decorations they had there were pretty odd.

What have we got here? A barking Christmas dog? He is singing Up on the House Top, except he is ruining the song by barking through half the lyrics, making the whole thing nonsensical. But still, it's practically adorable, especially with him flapping his ears with every little bark.

Oh, and what's this? A lovely Christmas tree that creepily extends and contracts its height and sings Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree. This one freaks me out a little bit.

I didn't buy the dog or the tree. But there were a few decorations that called out to me, and I had no choice but to buy them. (Warning, the volume of this clip is a tad louder than the previous ones.)

It's Charlie Brown and Snoopy! Actually, this is one of two Snoopys that were available at Lowe's, but this one had a better-looking outfit. They also had Woodstock available, but why would anybody waste their money on Woodstock? Snoopy plays Jingle Bells, and Charlie plays Jolly Old St. Nicholas. I really like the riff in the background. It's similar to the one in Linus and Lucy. I think that during the off-season (any time but December), they'll be staying in my room instead of heading out to the garage.

His smile still lets through a hint of bleakness, but the fact that he's willing himself to smile warms my heart. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown airs on the 28th on ABC. Mark your calendars!

We decorated the living room for Christmas yesterday and today. We moved the sofas into more an an "enclosing" arrangement to allow access to the fireplace.



I was totally in charge of assembling the artificial tree and hanging ornaments, but the tree is very much the same as it's looked in previous years, except there are more lights (there's 300 bulbs). I love my new Jelly Belly tree ornament. I found it at Cost Plus--they happen to have a lot of Jelly Belly stuff there.

I also created the construction paper chain that lines most of the room. It took me several hours to complete. I made most of it watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I found the secret to making the chains look good is to use only two colors and to make thick, tight chain links.

We've been listening to Halloween music all night thanks to our digital cable's Music Choice channel, Sounds of the Seasons, which all month long has constantly been piping Halloween music into my house. I'd been having a smashing time all night on this Halloween night until about 15 minutes ago, at 9:30 PM, when Deck the Halls suddenly started playing in place of Halloween music. Then after that, we heard The Jackson 5 sing Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. Angry and confused, Kevin and I walked into the living room to make sure that they weren't just fooling us. After all, it's just 9:30. But no, they've changed their programming to Christmas songs already!

The reason for this is obvious to me. Music Choice is based in the East Coast (Pennsylvania, it looks like), where Halloween has been already over for 45 minutes. But what about EVERYBODY BUT YOU, East Coast? You know, we're still trying to celebrate Halloween! It's only 9:30! The night's only beginning! But you've killed the Halloween mood.

We’re at my aunt’s house to celebrate Christmas! My sister, a handful of cousins, a boyfriend of one, and I made gingerbread houses out of graham crackers. There were only five platforms to work on, so Shelly and I worked together. We had a bunch of materials to work with, including two boxes of graham crackers, homemade frosting, and a whole bunch of sprinkles and candies. I found that the toothpicks worked even better than the knife for cutting the graham crackers. I'm posting a bunch of pictures below here. Sorry about the lighting and quality—Aunt Carla wasn't using her flash, despite our constant reminders. Or maybe her camera was broken.



Here's Stephanie’s. She decided to go with a traditional gingerbread house. It seemed to make her a long time to make the basic shape of the house. I guess it kept falling apart. I bet the roof will cave in—it's already starting to in this picture. I like what she did with the roof. She and Michelle made a "glaze" with water, frosting, and sprinkles. Shelly and I actually piloted the idea of mixing frosting with sprinkles to get a colored frosting mix.



Michelle decided to go with the winter theme a step more and make a ski jump. It’s kinda hard to see in the picture. She used several small rectangles to make the curved surface of the ski slope. She covered the platform with marshmallows for that lovely bumpy snow look.

I love the car. I've never seen a gingerbread car. It looks great. It looks like somebody put a gum wrapper on the top of the car—I think that's supposed to be skis. Oh, the other one's still on the ski jump. See at the foot of the ski jump the pair of red candies? Those are the feet of a marshmallow person who went headfirst into the snow. Aww, pity.



Here's Russell’s. He also went with a normal house, but he was a bit more ambitious with a large sloped roof. The roof was sliding off, so he had to put marshmallow column to hold it up. He lined the edges of the roof with peanut butter-flavored chocolate chips. He did the same thing that Stephanie did with the colored sprinkles on the roof. It looks nice like that that way. I like how part of the roof is cut away. I don't know what purpose that serves, but it looks neat.



Kevin says his gingerbread house is the best. I like it very much. He built it upside-down. It looks like there's a tree, and it's upside down too. If you haven't noticed, candy is everywhere! Candy on the top, candy littered on the ground, and look! Gold coins! This is why I like Kevin's gingerbread house so much. There's a chocolate bar stuck up in the top.



Shelly and I worked together, and still remembering our fun trip through Dallas, Texas, we decided it would be interesting to make a gingerbread airport. We started with the hangar, then we drew the runway. Then we were going to build a hospital landing pad for helicopters. Shelly drew a cross with the frosting, and I said, "Isn't it supposed to be an H in a circle?" and she said, "Oh well, now it's a Christian Airport," and Russell said, "It's Air Jesus!"

The airplane is made of marshmallows held together with toothpicks, a Hershey Kiss for the nose of the plane, and some graham crackers for the wings and tail. I suggested we make a red stripe across the plane, so we made some red frosting with red sprinkles, but Shelly missed and made a big fat smudge across the side of the plane, so we just decided to paint the entire plane. Then Shelly found some turkey things and added them to the airport. The one on the runway looks like it's dead, and we said it got run over by an airplane.

Overall, it was a lot of fun, I guess. I anticipate that over time, the roof on Stephanie's gingerbread house will collapse and fall in, Russell's roof will slide off, and other horrible things will happen with the other three gingerbread houses. Maybe their dog, Chica Sue, will try to eat them. Oh no, that would be horrible!

Aunt Karen arrives at Sea-Tac Airport on Wednesday afternoon. I want to go to the airport (exciting places, airports!) to pick her up, but I think Uncle Dick, who works really close to the airport, is going to pick her up instead. Then we're going to drive to Bellingham.

So today, at the blood center, I noticed a woman was bent over, resting with her head in her hand. I asked her if she was all right, she said not really, so I had to wave over the technicians. I've been working there since August, and this was the first time I had to get the technicians' attention for a person with "ill effects". They walked over with a wheelchair, and wheeled her back over to the beds so she could rest for another half hour. Whoa.

After that, Dad drove us over to the very nearby brand new Jo-Ann Fabric store because we had to wait for Mom and Stephanie to finish shopping there. While we were waiting, I bought a present for Stephanie. I can't post it on here because she's subscribed to this weblog. Oh well, now nobody can know. I noticed, at Jo-Ann Fabric, that Mom was holding a thing that looked like a Ninja Turtle! I asked, what's that, and she defensively hid it from my view. "Your Christmas present!" Oh, I can't look at that.

She must think I'm obsessed with the Ninja Turtles. Before we left for Kansas, she let me open a Christmas present that turned out to be a Ninja Turtles coloring book. She said it was a gag present, but it helped me pass a lot of time on the airplane.

Yesterday, in Calculus, Whitney brought Cranium and Scattergories. I don't think she brought them with the intention of playing in Calculus, but Mr. Worster was interested, and devoted the entire day to playing these board games. At first, he had us vote on which game to play. I voted for Scattergories, but the class was so divided that we all just decided to have both games play at once. So I played Scattergories with Alex, Aaron, and some other girl sorry I don't remember your name. Alex was really good. Aaron had never played, and I wasn't doing too badly. We played three games. I had 15 points, Aaron had 16, and Alex had 19. The girl had 10. Then we decided to play another three games, and Audrey joined us. She was awesome; she filled in nearly every blank, and even though we ran out of time and didn't get to total our scores for the last three games, I'm sure she won. I think the best answer of the day was "Something You're Afraid Of" starting with L, and Alex said "Lynching".

Today, we went to Petsmart like every year and got our pictures taken with the Santa. Again, this year, Santa was an old lady. Weird. Well, here's a picture.



We had a heck of a time getting the kitties to look at the camera.

Last Friday, I missed a test in Calculus test because I went to Kansas (remember?) so Mr. Worster was nice about it and let me make it up on Monday. And guess what. I got 100% on it! Phew, I thought I wasn't going to do so well. Derivatives are a little tricky.

Then, on Tuesday, I took a test in History about the Civil War. Blech... history. I'm not good at history. Then, we took our final early in Walking class. Phew... I was tired after that. We walked down the back road to the Meadowdale Beach, then walked up the Meadowdale Beach Trail, and back to school. It was about 4.5 miles, and when it wasn't uphill, it was steep downhill with slippery leaves.

Tuesday night, I made two dozen no-bake cookies for Christmas presents for my friends. Steffi helped me wrap them, and I gave them to some of the friends I saw yesterday and earlier today. I also made some math-themed badges for Mr. Worster. He really seemed to like them. He wore three of them during class. Audrey liked them, and asked where he got them. He said, "Well, um, Brandon gave them to me!" I'll post some of the images for the badges I made:

 

The first one simplifies to i/8 ("I overate"). You need to know trigonometry to find the fourth one funny.

Garth took the computer chair (he probably slept in it overnight) and I don't want to make him move...so I'm sitting in this hard dining table chair. It's not nearly as comfortable. Darn kitty, give me back the chair!

I recorded the entire Everybody Loves Raymond marathon. It took 2 video tapes. I shall watch it whenever I need to.

I think we're going to put the Christmas tree up today. I'll put pictures up when I get the opportunity. I made a chain out of red, white, and green construction paper. It's a Christmas decoration. It pretty. I put it up on the walls. It completely goes around the living room, and goes into the dining room a little. I made too much. I made it all during the ELR marathon.

We celebrated Christmas yesterday because we are going to visit my relatives in Bellingham tomorrow. Guess what I got! I got a camcorder! So did my sister! Now we'll both have to record stuff. We started to make a movie yesterday. I also got cherry cordials and a board game called Loser. It's funny. I put it on my list, so don't feel sorry for me or anything. And shirts, I got two shirts.

Yesterday, I also bought a GameCube game called Pac-Man World 2, but I bought it because it came with Pac-Man Vs., which is just about the coolest game ever, and it was only $20. Three players are ghosts, and they can only see part of the game field around them while trying to gang up and kill Pac-Man. The player who is Pac-Man uses the Game Boy Advance, which is hooked up to the GameCube. He can see the whole board, must try to avoid the ghosts and score points. It's fun. For some reason, Mario narrates the game!

Today, I went to lunch, as usual, and I brought my camera to take pictures for a collage I have to do in English, but nobody wanted their picture taken. So now, instead of one picture of all my friends, I have several individual pictures. Oh well. I'll just put each of those on my collage. I don't think my friends would like for me to post my pictures on here, so I won't.

They did like the Christmas presents I gave them. They were little Christmas tree-shaped boxes with candies and little tree ornaments attached. Emily, Katie U., Allison, and Bryan each got a Garfield ornament, and Katie K. and Cory, the sisters, each got connectable Peanuts ornaments. Everybody kept offering a candy to everybody else, despite the fact that they all had the same candy...

Oh, I have to thank everybody for the Christmas presents they gave me. And I'll thank Bryan in advance for his present, which he promised us he'd bring on Friday.

It's so rainy right now. Actually, it's calming down, but it was raining hard a half-hour ago. I was walking down the hill to my cul-de-sac, and five or six cars were in my way, so I couldn't cross the street. It was odd because there's usually little traffic in the area at all. What was annoying was the cars that were turning into my cul-de-sac, only to turn back around. So I had to stand in the rain and wait for the cars to pass.

I'm eating a lot of chocolate right now, but it's okay because I am drinking low-fat milk with it. If I'm going to eat something fattening and sugary, I might as well even it out by drinking something healthy.

I won! We put up the big tree! Mom didn't really want it up, but I said she wouldn't have to do any of the work. So I had to put it together and string the lights on by myself, but it was worth it. We also ended up rearranging the whole living room. Luckily for me, Clean Sweep was on TLC, so I could pick what ornaments would go on the tree, and Mom was too distracted watching TV to tell me what ornaments she didn't want on the tree. However, I couldn't find the angel or the tree skirt in the boxes. It's really pretty. I took plenty of pictures. If you're a member of KPA, you can see them here. If you're not a member, it's because you aren't a relative of mine. Oh well. Nothing you can do about that. Except marry one of my relatives...

Tomorrow, we're going to a Seahawks game. Mom always buys me tickets to events I know I won't like. It's the same with the Aerosmith concert last year. I didn't want to go. Overall, I didn't enjoy the concert very much. We parked a long way from the stadium. It was loud, too. Even though I had earplugs, I still had a headache. The worst thing that Kid Rock was opening for Aerosmith. No, I didn't enjoy that very much.

I hope I'll have fun at the Seahawks game. Mom promised me nachos. I really don't care to go. Dad said that it would be faster to get to our seats by helicopter than by escalator, so I'm assuming we have bad seats.

Recently, Stephanie's been bugging me. She's been contradicting herself all the time. She'll say something like, "I want to play the game with you, but I don't really want to," or something like, "I'm really energetic, but tired." It's really disturbing me. It seems like she can't make up her mind.

I'm starting to get tired. Decorating a tree and rearranging the furniture in one night can be exhausting. Phew. Dad promised me that he would find the angel and the tree skirt tomorrow morning before the game. I think we are leaving at 10:00. I'd better get to bed soon, then.

When Mom and Stephanie get back from shopping, we're going to discuss the Christmas decorations. I want a big, festive tree like we always do, with big ornaments, lights, an angel on top, and maybe some tinsel this time, but Mom wants to get rid of our traditional decorations and use only a stupid little tree. We wouldn't be able to put big ornaments on it, just those pathetic tiny ones. A string of lights would be too big, and the beautiful angel she bought last year at JCPenney (I think) would not fit on the small tree.

Of course, the reason she wants to use a little tree is because the big one would block the view of the television from the treadmill. With a big tree, Mom wouldn't be able to watch TV. My suggestion is that she move the treadmill so the big tree can go where it's supposed to. Besides, the treadmill only makes other people in the room upset. It's loud and annoying. There's the sound of the motor, the belt rubbing against the thing below it, and the loud thumps of feet banging against it. And for some reason, the treadmill smells funny.