I'm happy to announce the official opening of the new photo gallery on shaverfamily.org. Most of the photos from the old gallery were carried over, but there are about 5 albums that aren't complete as of yet. However, there are three new albums you'll want to check out. This gallery will be a work in progress in terms of design and possibly organization, but I wanted to go ahead and share what I've been working on up to this point. If you remember, I complained in November about the photo gallery and the need for something new; Ryan was kind enough to help me out by providing me with Gallerywalk, a PHP script he originally wrote to deal with photos from his wedding. It was my first experience as a beta-tester, and it really wasn't all that difficult. He did a nice job with the script. Thanks, Ryan. I am really enjoying the digital camera we got back in March. I feel like it's allowed me to learn more about photography because I'm not worrying about wasting film. I am open to critiques and comments on any of my photos; so if you have thoughts, please feel free to send me an email.

written by Katherine at 6:29 PM | link | 0 comments

Getting closer to a new photo gallery for shaverfamily.org, with Ryan's gracious assistance. Most of the photos from the current gallery will be preserved in the new one, and you can expect quite a bit of new content as well. I'm aiming to finish this up within a week.

written by Katherine at 11:36 PM | link | 0 comments

Proof of yesterday's blog entry, taken last night. But ain't he cute?



(And no, our walls are not painted pink, it's the glow of the tree lights.)

written by Katherine at 8:48 AM | link | 0 comments

The bottom third of the Christmas tree had been graced with ornaments for barely 10 hours this morning when we played out episode #1 of "The Shaver Pets Dismantle the Christmas Tree." A little background: Last year's Christmas tree was a joke. Hannah, the Lab, and Jefferson, the cat, tag-teamed in an all-out spectacle of destruction. Jefferson would take the first turn, batting wildly at low-hanging ornaments until they fell off the tree. He would play with the bright, shiny globes on the floor for a few minutes until his game was interrupted by Hannah, who played by a different set of rules: if it's on the floor, it must be mine. You know what you hear about Labs being soft-mouthed? Well, it never occurred to Hannah to be soft-mouthed with the ornaments, and at least twice I came home to find her lying on the bed or her favorite rug, surrounded by a rainbow assortment of small pieces of glass. After a frantic search for the ornament hangers and a call to the vet, Hannah would enjoy a dinner of Shredded Wheat and chicken broth, specially prepared to escort the pieces of glass safely through her system. Granted, this was the worst-case scenario, and it only happened a couple of times, when I was dumb enough not to crate Hannah when I was out. The rest of the time, Jefferson was the only culprit, and while he didn't do much damage to the ornaments or endanger his health, he forced redecoration of the tree every single day. I don't think a day went by that I didn't have to rearrange the strands of lights at the bottom of the tree and put ornaments back in their proper place. Finally, around mid-December, I gave in and took the Christmas tree down, satisfying my need for decoration by stringing the lights around the living room where the walls met the ceiling. Not exactly a Norman Rockwell kind of Christmas. Beginning in early fall of this year, we began evaluating different strategies that might help us achieve our goals: 1) To have a nicely decorated Christmas tree. 2) To only have to hang lights and ornaments once, or twice, at most. 3) To limit ornament breakage to that caused by human clumsiness. 4) To make it through the holiday season without purchasing Shredded Wheat. We considered several possibilities: decorating the tree with homemade dog biscuits (too tempting), putting some kind of gate or fence around the tree (too tacky), getting a small tabletop tree only or not having a tree at all (no fun). We finally ended up with a fairly common sense solution: we gave Jefferson his own room. He is spending his days and nights (basically, any unsupervised time) in the 3rd bedroom in our house, which used to be a baby's nursery. Hannah and Henry are, of course, crated during the day - every day. In the beginning, I felt that we were being cruel to Jefferson by denying him his favorite sleeping spots, but it turns out he really likes having his own room. Sometimes he prefers to stay in even when given the choice to come out (is this what it's like having a surly teenager in the house?). So, on with the story. The weekend we got the tree, we did our first round of decorating, which included the lights (we got the clip-on kind that are a bit hot to the touch) and ornaments on the top two-thirds of the tree. Then, the tree sat unfinished for over a week. We'd made two decisions about the ornaments for the bottom of the tree: they had to be wired on, and they had to be ornaments we didn't care about. How to select ornaments knowing we might be putting them on a fast-track to destruction? Finally, last night, we finished the decorating. The tree looks great, but a close inspection reveals that there are only solid color satin or glass ornaments on the bottom branches. Glass, you ask? Well, we have to put something down there, and it's hard to find an ornament you don't care about that's made of any other substance. This morning, as we were finishing breakfast and getting ready for work, we saw Henry (the other Lab in the household) slink away from the Christmas tree. We cornered him in the bedroom and removed a still-intact silver glass ball from his mouth, it's top and hanger missing. We rushed to the tree to search for the missing parts, and found the hanger still twisted to the tree with the top hanging from it. Somehow Henry managed to remove the ball from the top and run off with it, all without breaking anything. He's a sly little devil, and now we know we have to watch him like a hawk. I can only assume that Hannah's been sharing her Christmas knowledge with Henry... how else would you explain it? Stay tuned... I'm sure we'll have at least a few more episodes before Christmas 2001 goes down in the record books.

written by Katherine at 2:43 PM | link | 0 comments

Woo, it's another fast post, like last night. I'm happy to say that we finished putting ornaments on the Christmas tree, and we hereby declare it fully decorated. Tonight I made my final decisions as to what baking I want to do for Christmas... there will be lots of good things coming out of the Shaver kitchen in the next few days... Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake, banana bread, and decorated sugar cookies, to name a few. Just call us Martha. Stewart, that is. I love baking and making desserts, and Christmas gives me a great excuse to concoct plenty of unhealthy goodies without the responsibility of eating all of them. Not that I won't be consuming my fair share of goodies, mind you...

written by Katherine at 10:35 PM | link | 0 comments

Ready. Set. GO. This is a quick, take-no-more-than-five-minutes-to-write-it kind of post. We have absolutely got to get some sleep, thus the self-imposed time limit for blogging. We went up to my parents' on Friday night and helped them get their Christmas trees on Saturday. We returned to Raleigh late Saturday night and we're still not quite recovered on sleep. It was a great trip though, and it was good to be able to do a favor for them, given that they do so much for us. Sunday morning I played handbells in church at both services. I was so tired, I was nearly delusional. I would have to say, though, that more often than not I don't get enough sleep the night before I am to play handbells in church. Why do I do that to myself? Anyway, one of the pieces we played was the Hallelujah Chorus, which is one of my favorite pieces of all time. We did pretty well and I enjoyed playing a fun bass part. Late last night a scary / freaky thing happened. Chris and I were sitting at the dining room table when all of a sudden the light fixture globe in the kitchen crashed down from the ceiling. It scared the living daylights out of me... my first thought was that someone had fired a shot through the kitchen window. Not so, but it was freaky nonetheless. Glass was everywhere... some even flew up over the kitchen counter into the dining room (we have an open bar / counter type of thing). I am so glad that neither of us, or any of the pets, was in the kitchen... Chris had been doing kitchen cleanup earlier but had come to sit at the table with me while I worked on making a Christmas bow. The force of the globe hitting the floor left an indentation from the pattern of the glass in the linoleum tile. I hate to think what that would have done to one of our heads. So, even though today was a rough day from the sleep standpoint, I was quite glad to be alive and in one piece, glad to be at work and not at the hospital. Um, how is it only 2 more weeks till Christmas? Yikes. I need about 2 extra weeks, and then I'll be ready. Maybe we should hold Christmas in January. :) Okay, I've already run over my 5 minute time limit. Gotta hit the hay. G'night.

written by Katherine at 10:32 PM | link | 0 comments

Last night I went to Michael's to get some Christmas decorations. I wonder if it was obvious to the other shoppers how much that place gives me the heebie jeebies. I feel totally inadequate in any type of do-it-yourself craft store. It all seems like such a great idea, but I usually don't have the know-how or the patience to see it through to the finished product. I did take one small step last night though - I bought a fake pine wreath and a spool of red ribbon and I am going to attempt to make a bow to put on the wreath. Fortunately the wreath came with some pine cones already in place so I don't have to add anything else. They had wreaths with absolutely nothing on them, and you could pick out your own decorations, but I was not brave enough for that. We'll see how it goes. I have a little bit of bow-making experience, but I've never tried it solo before.

written by Katherine at 1:55 PM | link | 0 comments

It's that busy time of year... somehow blogging just hasn't been at the top of my list. This weekend we got our Christmas tree. It was a new and fun experience. We really didn't want to buy a tree from the places set up temporarily by the side of the road, so we went to a tree farm. We waxed nostalgic and ended up with a cedar tree. My parents always got cedar trees until recently, but they didn't buy them... I remember several tree-hunting excursions in the woods as a kid. Chris's grandparents also used to get cedars, so it was a throwback to childhood for both of us. We sawed it down ourselves, had it shaken and bagged (ever seen a cedar tree in fishnet stockings?) and learned that yes, Virginia, you can fit an 8 foot tree in a Honda Civic DX Coupe and go tooling down I-40.

We went through all kinds of trials and tribulations to get the thing up straight, though. First, we "borrowed" a tree stand we found in the attic that was left behind by a previous occupant of the house. Now we know why. By the time we were finished with it, we couldn't get all four legs to touch the floor at the same time. Needless to say, that stand is now in tree-stand heaven. We ended up laying the tree back down on the floor and heading out to Wal-Mart, as we needed to get some lights and other items as well. Big mistake... Wal-Mart was not the place to be on Saturday evening, December 1. They had no tree stands that we could find and they only had all red lights in the specific type that we wanted (C7 lights, to be exact, the kind with the screw-in bulbs). Once, when I was pretty young, my parents tried a Christmas tree with all red lights. It was forever more known as the Burning Bush, and I wasn't about to repeat that experiment. So, we headed for K-Mart, which turned out to be a better choice. We got the tree stand, lights, and some other assorted decoration needs and headed home.

Assembling the new tree stand was one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken. The design was such that it was impossible to put it together correctly. After a bit of bending and shoving here and there, we finally got it together, and are pleased to report that it works much better than our "freebie." Sunday was a more pleasant day in terms of tree decoration - Chris put the lights on while I watched It's A Wonderful Life (the first time I'd really seen it) and we hung quite a few ornaments. We are going to have to venture back out into the commercial madness to get some more ornaments, so it's not yet finished, but here are a couple of pictures for your viewing pleasure (note the can of Liquid Wrench and the croquet mallet in the lefthand picture - tools of the trade):





You can click each picture for a larger size photo.

written by Katherine at 11:42 PM | link | 0 comments