.: bistan.net :.

This morning, at the Reindeer Run 5K, there was a Santa walking around taking pictures.  The Santa was actually my Sunday School teacher from when I was in the 7th grade!

Of course, I couldn’t say anything in front of the kids. But, when he finally realized it, he said “Oh, that’s you Jonathan!” and then asked about my sister, stepfather, etc.  Let’s just say my kids were EXTREMELY impressed that Santa knows their dad!

And, since he knew me, he showed my kids lots of attention.

I ran a good race, too. Only about a minute off of my PR on a VERY challenging course!

This year I only have to do one post for the first day of school because BOTH of my kids are in elementary school!  I still can’t believe that my “baby” is in kindergarten and I have a second grader!

And, in case you missed it . . .

Last year:

• Tristan’s first day of first grade
• Mackenzie’s first day of 4K

Even older:

• Tristan’s first day of kindergarten
• Mackenzie’s first day of 3K

Three years ago on Christmas, when Tristan was 4 and Mackenzie was just 18 months old, Santa brought them a shiny new red mustang.

Flash forward a few years. Now, Mackenzie is the 4-year-old and Tristan has outgrown the Power-wheels.

I’m actually amazed the battery has lasted this long!

Two years ago, after my mother died, I found five Super-8 film reels in my parents basement.  After shelving them for a while, I decided to finally do something with them.  I searched the internet for months to find someone who could convert the reels to a digital format at a decent price and found a company in Texas.  I was a little hesitant about shipping the reels to Texas because I had no idea what was on them.  I finally decided that by not knowing the contents of the films, I wouldn’t miss them if they were lost so two weeks ago, off they went.

Today, I received my films back, along with a DVD of the contents, and my portable hard drive that I sent with an AVI of the films.  Even though I really had to pee, I immediately proceeded to watch the movies. I finally discovered what was on them:

• Christmas 1980
• Christmas 1981
• my third birthday (February, 1982)
• my sister’s first birthday (September, 1982)
• my fourth birthday (February, 1983)

The clips also include many other special moments.  What is most important, however, isn’t what is on the video, but rather who is on the video.  All of the videos contain my parents, my grandparents (all of whom are long gone), and other cousins, relatives, and friends.  Many of them I am still connected to via Facebook but several of them are gone.  While watching the clips, I both laughed and cried.  This was the best package that I have ever received from UPS.

Tonight, I shared the clips with my family.  It’s amazing how much my kids resemble my sister and I and how much my sister resembles one of my aunts and how my mother aged to resemble her mother.  What was my uncle thinking wearing those red shoes — even in the 1980s?  And the clothing and hairstyles?  There were several toys in the clips that I held onto and passed on to my kids!

Of course, the clips will be uploaded to YouTube and featured right here.  But not yet.  I’m going to package the clips on a DVD as a Christmas present to my sister and father.  Although neither read this blog, they do occasionally look at YouTube.  I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Remember my Year from Hell post from July?  It hasn’t gotten any better yet:

In August:

• The locks on my car quit working
• My lawn mower died

In September:

• We had to replace our mattress
• Our air conditioner pump malfunctioned, sending gallons of water into the air intake
• Kimberlie passed out at a church soccer game — the only soccer game I wasn’t at.  We convinced the ambulance and firemen that she didn’t need to go to the hospital.

And so far in October:

• We just had to replace the battery and one of the tires on Kimberlie’s car.
• Let’s just say that last Wednesday was one of the worst days of my life.  In October 2008, I was in my first car accident in my life.  In late September 2009, I was in another.  Neither of them were my fault and both involved uninsured drivers, leaving me to foot the bill.  This week, I was in the third accident of my life. Unfortunately, I can’t elaborate publicly in the event that litigation arises.

So far, 2010 has not been a great year . . .

In January:

• Kimberlie’s mother died

In February:

• Mackenzie gets kid-mono.  Between the two of us, we spent almost two weeks away from work, doing nothing but this:

  

In March:

• We went through a tough eating-out hiatus.
• T-ball.  Need I say more?

In April:

• Tristan learns to stick things where they don’t belong.
• Tristan has a major accident during a day trip.
• I went to the doctor (for the first time in 20 years).

In May:

• A house catastrophe.
• No raises at work.

In June:

• I ended up in 2 graduate classes during a 4-week summer semester.  Of course, I ended up with A’s, but it was a tough month.
• Mackenzie ended up sick (and very irritable) for half of our trip to Philadelphia.

And now, July:

• The cat chewed up my Macbook power cord.
• We lost our “free” cable and I my iPhone and digital camera went for a swim . . . in the same week.
• Ants seem to invade a different room of our house everyday.

Of course, there are things that have been happening (or not) all year:

• The stock market has really sucked for the last few months.
• I’m 31 and still not rich enough to retire.
• Publisher’s Clearinghouse still hasn’t knocked on my door.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still love my life.  But even number years just never work out for us.  2008 was equally as bad.  2007 and 2009 were fabulous.  Let’s hope I can make it through the next five months alive!

I told you I still had those 25-year-old Tinkertoys!

With Toy Story 3 taking over the theatres, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the toys from my own childhood.  We recently visited the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia and found that they had many of the toys from my childhood in mint condition.  Please forgive the photo quality.  All of these toys were photographed from behind a glass case with horrible lighting conditions.

These Fisher Price blocks popped up around 1976 and I popped out three years later, so naturally I had a set:

I also had one of these, although it remained at my grandparents house:

I miss my Construx set.  It was like an erector set for kids:

The Spirograph was awesome:

I have this exact set of Tinkertoys (on the right) in my attic:

My favorite toy growing up were Legos.  I still have thousands of Legos in my parent’s basement.  I wish I had room for them at my house.

I also had this Snoopy Sno-Cone machine.  It looks like this one is missing a piece — the red shovel.  The Snoopy on top served two functions.  You pressed it down to push the ice through and you turned it upside down to squeeze the syrup through.

I had this Popoids before I got into Legos:

I still remember the jingle “Pogo Ball is what you call it”.  And I had one:

I also had this exact Tonka truck.  Tristan has something similar, but it’s bigger and the quality is much less.

SuperSoakers were the watergun that every kid wanted.  I remember the SuperSoaker 50, SuperSoaker 100, and SuperSoaker 250:

My sister and I had lots of Little People sets.   Little People are still around, though they’ve evolved over the years.  She had the nursery set, seen below:

My sister was also very much into Barbies.  She had the McDonald set seen in the next two photos.  I’m trying to do whatever possible to steer my daughter away from Barbies.

So what does a museum do with surplus toys? Build sculptures of course! This is a real size sculpture of the arm/torch from the Statue of Liberty, constructed of old toys:

This is an life-sized elephant, also constructed from toys:

Who know’s what the next popular toy is going to be?  Right now, “Silly Bandz” are all the rage.  If you’ve looked closely at photos of my kids recently on this blog, you’ll see that they have an arm full.  The museum even had some on display, and they’ve only been around a few short months!

Of course, this is not my complete “Toy Story”.  I had tons of cool toys.  But visiting the museum and watching Toy Story definitely brought back memories!

So this is what I was doing seven years ago . . .

(Sorry for the low quality picture. This was before we were 100% digital!)

This video is over 8 years old, but I recently converted it from VHS to digital (apologies in advance for the low-quality).  My sister and I went skydiving with a friend from college in 2001.  I had to go with Vimeo because YouTube sucks.  First, there were length issues and then they didn’t like the licensed music.   Enjoy this flashback!

Skydiving from Jonathan Davis on Vimeo.