The Houghs: ...aaaaaaand That Was January.

2016 marked the coldest start of the year for the Hough family since 2006. Our Floridian blood, still not accustomed to the frigid tundra of Central Michigan, has made this winter particularly brutal (despite everybody and their brother saying, "this is a mild winter, guys.")

With the Holiday Season officially behind us, everyday usualness returned in due order. Kris and I went back to work, the kids went back to school, and time slowed down. A lot. While not seeming as long and dull as, say, August, January is still a far cry from the three-day-long month of December. As you can see from the pictures that follow, we didn't do too much outside of the usual grind (which definitely stands in stark contrast with the previous two months.)

Check it out. . .

Came down into the basement to find the girls playing with a bizarro-mix of Playmobil and toy dinosaurs, chanting "SACRIFICE! SACRIFICE! SACRIFICE!" over and over and over again. Nothing creepy about that. At all.

Reenacting Abby's favorite Star Wars movie, The Return of the Jedi, with some of her Christmas loot. . .

I forget what, exactly, she was pissed about, but one morning Abby decided to boycott our family breakfast and seek solitude instead out on the back patio. In the middle of winter. In her Darth Vader pajamas.

It had been awhile since I had gone vinyl record shopping, and the itch was starting to get to me. While Kris and the girls were off visiting her mom in Clare one Saturday, Yours Truly hit up three different thrift shops in Midland over the course of a couple hours on a quest for new jams. . .

I ended up spending a total of $12, and scored 8 LPs and three 4-record box sets (all, surprisingly enough, in Near Mint playable condition), two books, and one old PS2 game for the girls. It took a little conversational prowess with a flirtatious girl at the register in order to get that price, but at the end of the day I was able to walk away with a pretty sound collection of plunder (mostly classical.)

(FYI - those Tijuana albums are GOLD. Especially that Tijuana Christmas LP. . . I imagine that gem will get some pretty heavy rotation next Holiday season. . .)

The boxed sets

See that Bird Sounds boxed set at the right in the previous picture? The records inside are slightly smaller than your usual 33 RPM, and are insanely flexible, which I've never seen before. Kinda weird, but the kids get a kick out of them. . .

Another retro videogaming session, featuring the NES and PS2.

Dad and Cindy got me a Bose Color Soundlink bluetooth speaker for Christmas this year, and while it was the color that I wanted (standard black), I felt that the speaker could use some definite 'snazzin'' up. I therefore bought this leather, Old World-styled case off Amazon, and the sum'bitch fits like a glove. . .

The cut-away areas accommodate all the usual plug-in areas for chords, as well as buttons, and there's a protective mesh covering for the speaker faces, meaning I can keep this thing on at all times and further protect my speaker. To make things even more awesome, even with this protective case on, the speaker still fits in my foam-fitted, hardshell zip-up case I have for the speaker and chords. Consider this Nerding Out at a Master Level.

Kris recently started a new series of books with the girls as part of their nightly, wind-down, reading session: Baum's Oz series. The Wizard of Oz - the most prolific book in the series - is the first book, but there's, like, twenty or so books that follow it. So far the girls are really into it, so we'll see if Kris can complete the entire run.

Our basement, on any given weekday.

The girls had a weekday School event at the Roll Arena a couple weeks ago: Chestnut Hill rented out the entire place and the girls were able to skate around (or awkwardly try to do so, at any rate) with their friends from school.

Abby spent more time on the planks than her sister did, as the Cannonball was too busy socializing and ohmygoshing with her friends from school around the arcade and ticket-spewing games. . .

Winning some tickets with one of her friends from class. . .

Abby wasn't very happy with her sister's lack of enthusiasm for skating. . .

Kris showed up after she got out of work, just in time to get some usual scolding in. . .

Waiting for the doc at the Pediatrician's Office (they let kids pick out out a free book to take home, so Alayna scored herself a National Geographic reader about Sharks.) Alayna had been complaining about her stomach on and off for a couple weeks, and the night before we took her in she actually woke up crying due to the pain. The docs where we take her (I forget the name of the place) are pretty thorough, and they determined her stomach pains were caused by her switching back to dairy milk after years of drinking soy. Consequently, Alayna was put on a two-week, no-dairy diet, which eventually cured her of those nasty stomach pains.

Dolled up and ready for school (usually Kris takes the girls to school in the morning, so I wasn't sure if the make up thing was even allowed. They eventually talked me into it.)