Merry Christmas!

Hope you’re all having a great Christmas! After a couple days of rain, we finally got some snow before noon today, so we are having a white Christmas after all.

It’s a tradition at the Runner family to make spaghetti for supper on Christmas Eve, yet our schedule didn’t look too promising this year, so the ever-thoughtful K decided that we would instead go to Fazoli’s for a late pasta lunch instead.  We are nothing if not adaptable!

After a busy afternoon of helping out at some of the church Christmas services and singing in the choir, we joined a nice gathering of friends at the Griffiths.  We eventually made it home to open gifts and get some well-deserved sleep. It’s been a wonderful holiday.

Oh, and among other great gifts, Mo & K framed this year’s Homer Hanky for me. Looks like I’ll have to update my blog banner sometime.

2009 Homer Hanky

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MN Flashback III – Christmas at Beltrami School

Forty years ago, Beltrami, MN used to have it’s own elementary school, before it completely merged with the school in Fertile, MN. I was lucky enough to have attended grades 1 through 4 there, the last four years of its existence.

One of the treats for the parents (and for the kids, I guess) was the choir concerts we would perform in the auditorium at various intervals during the school year.  Earlier this year, a good friend treated me with the following photo attached to an email.  My memory is pretty fuzzy, but I would guess that we weren’t particularly thrilled with the outfits.  And yes, that motley bunch represents Mrs. Regedahl’s entire 1^st and 2^nd grade classes.

Christmas concert group photo, 1969
I am front row, third from the left; AZ Bro is directly in front of the tree

Have a Merry Christmas, and a safe and healthy New Year.

Christmas Friday Random 10

Time to get seasonal on the Friday Random 10.  The first Christmas tracks to pop off the external HD:

1. “Good King Wenceslas” – Canadian Brass, The Christmas Album
2. “Snowman’s Land” – Keith Emerson, The Christmas Album
3. “Last Time by Moonlight” – Enya, And Winter Came
4. “Farandole” – The Salvation Army Brass, Christmas in Brass 2009 ¹
5. “Break Forth, O Beauteous Heav’nly Light” – Glad, An Acapella Christmas
6. “White Christmas” – The Manhattan Transfer, An Acapella Christmas
7. “O Come All Ye Faithful” – Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Jingle All the Way
8. “Forest of Fire” – Jon Anderson, 3 Ships
9. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” – Mannheim Steamroller, A Fresh Aire Christmas ²
10. “The First Noel” – Tom Stacy, A nu-view Christmas

The list finished up strong, with my favorite seasonal hymn, and then my favorite Christmas track that I own.  The new age toodling of Tom Stacy on English Horn is beautiful background listening to get yourself into a Christmas mood.

¹ One of the sound guys at church is active in the Salvation Army, and has given the brass ensemble members a copy of the Christmas in Brass CD for the last 3-4 years. You’re a good guy, Dan.

² In college back in the early ’80s, we used to listen to Fresh Aire, long before the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas phenomenon.  American Grammaphone is one of the best things to come out of Omaha.

Thoughts and Sox

Just completed a trade with AdamE over at Thoughts and Sox; well, not so much a trade as an exchange. As can happen over the ‘net with many of the great virtual neighborhood of collectors, testing the waters for a possible trade didn’t work out as planned, but still came out great.

Although AdamE is a fellow “Show Me” stater, he also is a fan of an out-of-state team — in his case, the Boston Red Sox. Among his wantlist were some ’71 and ’74 cards I still had from my youth, so I dropped AdamE a line.  In his prompt reply, he stated that he didn’t have many Twins at the moment, but asked for my address so he could send them my way anyway.  Dude!  Wanting to return the favor, I dropped Sparky Lyle’s 1971 hi# smiling face into a Christmas card and sent it off in return.  And when AdamE’s cards arrived, there were some fun ones among them.

clockwise, from top left: 2009 Upper Deck O-Pee-Chee (Target black border) #458 Joe Nathan; 2009 Upper Deck O-Pee-Chee #554 “Moments”; 1998 Bowman David Ortiz in his best “holding the runner on-OMG don’t throw it to me!” pose; 2008 Topps Update Gold #UH290 [756/2008] Carlos Gomez

My thanks to AdamE for the cards. Feel free to drop him a line if you have something he might want.  And AdamE, I still have more where that ’71 came from, so let me know if you stumble across any other Twins in the future!

^{A note on the Joe Mauer “Moments” card pictured above: This is the game in question, an interleague game at Arizona, and as you can see, Joe went hitless.  The back of the card praises Joe as he “…helped the Twins keep a big inning going…as they scored five times in the fifth to take the lead.”  With two outs in that inning, Joe reached on a GB error.  L-A-M-E, Upper Deck.  Still, in their defense, they didn’t say “Great Moments” or anything.}

Soundtrack Friday Random 10

Time to put Pandora back in its box; this week’s random 10 are soundtrack tunes off the extended harddrive.

1. “Panic” – Yasunori Mitsuda, Xenosaga
2. “Absinken” – Klaus Doldinger, Das Boot (The Directors Cut)
3. “Half of Me is Wild” – John Scott, Greystoke, The Legend of Tarzan
4. “Dangerous Woman” – Rick Wakeman, Crimes of Passion
5. “Laurens, Iowa” – Angelo Badalamenti, The Straight Story
6. “Chores” – Jerry Goldsmith, Fierce Creatures
7. “Speargun” – James Newton Howard, Waterworld
8. “Samwise the Brave” – Howard Shore, Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers
9. “Treasure” – Trevor Rabin, National Treasure
10. “The Far Side of the World” – Christopher Gordon, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

That worked out well.