Atherton Family Notes

I’ve got a list of things that I want to write about, but I haven’t been able to find the time to do it.  I could make the excuse that we’re in the middle of the Christmas season, but that didn’t slow me down last year.

Part of the reason why I haven’t been writing much recently is that I spent last week in Beijing for work, and anytime I wasn’t at the lab or at a restaurant, I was asleep.  I found it very difficult to do anything else, although I did manage to walk over to the nearby Wal-mart one evening to explore and I also made it to the Temple of Heaven the morning before I left (which just increases the number of things I want to write about.)

Also, I’ve discovered that I’m having to trade my writing time for exercise time.  Losing weight takes a fair amount of effort and that extra 1 to 2 hours of exercise per day really cuts into the time I have to write.  It’s funny, though, that exercise doesn’t eat into the time I have to do non-productive things on my computer or to sit on the couch and watch the Daily Show…  It appears that my body has a set amount of time that it can spend either mental or physical effort, so exercising makes me less likely to write, but not less likely to vegetate.  Go figure.

It’s also possible that I may have bitten off more than I can chew for the Christmas video this year.  It’s not any one thing, it’s a bunch of little things that are adding up.  This will be our tenth year making a Christmas video, and inevitably the plan is evolving from doing a video that basically amounts to a “clip show” to something that will probably take more effort than any previous one that we’ve done.

Plus, somehow I’ve gotten it in my head that the video needs to be posted to YouTube, and the only way to guarantee that you can get around Google’s copyright police is to write (or at least perform) your own music.  Yeah.  So I’ve been learning how to use a lot of recording and performance tools in the past few weeks as well.  It’s been interesting, but it’s not writing.

At the moment, I’d qualify the music track as half done.  The accompaniment track is about 70% complete, and we’ll need to record the singing tracks and mix the result.  The girls are starting to learn the song and I’m even working on getting Sandi to sing a line or two (Hooray for Auto-Tune!)

The video, however, is only about 1% complete.  We’ve got the idea for what we want to do, and I’ve started storyboarding it, but we haven’t yet done any of the execution yet.  This isn’t really that unusual, but I will feel a bit better once we have at least a little footage in the can.  We’ll hopefully starting resolving that issue this weekend.

Wish us luck!

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So my birthday has come and gone and, bottom line, I didn’t quite make it to my goal.

I’ve spent a fair amount of the last week away from home, so I wasn’t able to weigh in on my birthday, but on December 10th, I weighed in at 231.2 pounds.  Between the holidays and the increased amount of travel (both business and personal) recently, it’s been much harder to diet in the last 45 days.

But let’s not focus on the negative.  There’s lots of good news here:

1. I’ve lost 35.6 pounds since mid-July — and 46.8 pounds since the beginning of summer!  that’s almost 17% of my body weight.
2. I’ve gone from having a tight size 42 waist to having a comfortable 38.
3. My t-shirt size has dropped from 2XL to XL — and in some cases I’ve even been able to fit into size L.
4. I weigh less than when I reached my lowest point while living in Europe, which was previously my lowest weight in the last 10 years — although I wasn’t really trying to lose wieght then — thanks again, typical US diet.  :-)
5. I’ve been able to stop taking some of the diabetes medication since my diet keeps my blood sugar under better control.

So I’ve made a lot of progress, and the good news is that I’ve continued to lose weight even in the last month or so.  I’ve still got a long way to go, though.  In fact, I really should lose another 40 pounds from where I am now, so it’s only time to celebrate for a moment, then get back to work.

I’m not sure what to call the updates now, though.  Maybe “forty while forty”?

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Sandi’s grandmother, Blanche Cotton passed away last Sunday after a long, slow decline in her health.  While I was researching some of the photos for our Christmas video this year, I came upon the picture below of GG Cotton (as our girls knew her) in better days.  I thought I’d share this picture, because this is the way I like to remember her.

This picture is from October 5, 1999.  GG is holding Carissa, who was about 4-and-a-half months old at the time.

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Here’s a random photo from our annual Gingerbread party this year.

…just in case anyone was wondering why Katie had trouble getting to sleep last Sunday night!

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Whew!  I finally started uploading the video this morning about 3:45am.  We didn’t get to start on the video as early as we usually do, so I was doing some scrambling last night to put the final touches on it.

We’ve done little bits of stop motion animation in the past, but we went all out this year.  We were inspired by the video that won the Amazon Kindle contest this year to give it a try.  I like how it turned out — the style reminds me a little bit of watching Sesame  Street as a child.

Also new this year is the music.  Normally, we spend a lot of time trying to pick out a song for the video.  This process often starts before summer is over, and can last months.  This year, I decided to write the music (with a little help from John Lennon at the end).  This turned out to be a life saver as the deadline approached because I didn’t have time to design a website like I have in the past and writing your own music is the only way to guarantee that you can get past the copyright police at YouTube.

So without further ado (we strongly recommend you watch full screen):

A few notes:

The stop motion animation is composed from about 300 pictures drawn from about 500 or so source frames. We mounted the camera on the ceiling of our basement. Sandi did the principal photography and I assembled the animation sequences in Photoshop.

This is the 10th video we’ve done — the first was in 2000, when Carissa was about 18 months old. The timeline sequence at the beginning is all of the Christmas cards we’ve sent beginning the year Carissa was born.

The verses of the song are sung (in order) by Sadie, Celia and Carissa. We didn’t have time to put this into the credits.

ICE! is an annual exhibit at the Gaylord Opryland resort in Nashville. It’s surprisingly expensive and the whole exhibit is kept at 10 degrees Fahrenheit which has the effect of making you want to get through it as quickly as possible! Still, it was pretty impressive and we enjoyed the Charlie Brown theme.

This is also the 10th year that Sandi has done a gingerbread house, and like our video, the degree of difficulty seems to keep going up every year. I thought about doing a montage of the houses in the video, but there wasn’t enough time to squeeze them in. Instead you get pictures of the first one and most recent one.

The girl’s gingerbread party has also become a tradition in our house. It started in 2004 when we were in France and Sandi got the idea to share the art of gingerbread house decorating with some of our kid’s friends there. Gingerbread is not especially common in much of France, which seems odd given their proximity to Germany. Now we have the gingerbread party at Christmas time instead of having three big birthday parties during the year.

We visited Franklin as part of our trip to Nashville. My cousin Amy lives in town and we dragged her and her family to the Franklin Dickens Days celebration. The girls enjoyed the folk dancing in particular.

And yes, Sadie did her entire school program in her PJs.

We also made a trip to the IMA for their “Longest Night” celebration where we saw ice sculptures being made, toured the Lily house decorated in the style of 1943, and Carissa even kissed a real reindeer. None of the pictures or video turned out well enough to use though. (It was pretty dark after all).

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