Anyway, I figured I’d share a little promise I made with the team at iFLOOR before I left. I told them I would visit as often as I visited my aging mother.

It was meant to be a joke at first, or at the very least imply that I wouldn’t be seeing them all that often. But, as it turns out, I’ll be seeing them for the second time in a little more than 2 months.

Not bad for my usual run rate of visiting by mother.

She wisely recomended that they don’t do white elephant- since the younger ones wouldn’t understand someone stealing their present. But the three oldest kids, Spencer, Jessica, and Gabe could even participate in the white elephant since they are old enough to understand. Megan, the next oldest could be in charge of all the younger kids at the gift exchange. Each kid will need a small present to exchange with each other. This is not supposed to be expensive- or stress anyone out. You can use something you already have like you might for the white elephant exchange.

We will just have each child “draw one name” or something when everyone gets here. Or if you prefer, we can have Kristin draw the names for all the kids so we know before hand. Since eveyone is traveling- small is good. Also, just like the white elephant, a $5 limit is a good thing. I think most of the kids could earn their own money for their small gift for this exchange.

We thought this might help connect the cousins together and give them something fun to do while we do the white elephant.

Leave your thoughts and comments here.

(PS, hopefully Holly and Ben can figure out a way to come!)

All of us in Washington will be going to Arizona for Christmas. However, contrary to popular grapevine rumors, we only just made the plans on Thanksgiving. Anybody who heard anything else prior needs to check their sources.

OK, here’s the approximate itinerary:
Saturday, December 16th, 9:05pm – Dennis, Cris, and Bryan arrive in Los Angeles
Thursday, December 21st, 11:00am – Dennis, Cris, Bryan, Steve, Annie, and Kids arrive in Phoenix
Monday, December 25th, 8:00pm-ish – Dennis, Cris depart Phoenix to Seattle
Wednesday, December 27th, 4:45pm – Bryan departs Phoenix to Seattle
Thursday, December 28th, 9:00am-ish – Steve, Annie, and Kids depart Phoenix to Seattle

As I’ve been trying to get this blog working, and increase participation in said blog, I’ve spent a LONG time on the phone as a tech support guy, trying to help people post their posts.

In my endeavors, I realized just how severe the need is for people to communicate. All of my tech support calls inevitably became a long-winded series of stories to help catch-up the other respective party who was out of the loop…things the blog is supposed to handle.

Let’s do the math. How much phone time would it take for all of us to be caught up with each other, and for kids to say their interstate hellos? Well, nine Simonson kids, two Simonson parents, eleven “next-gen” kids– that’s twenty-two people full of hundreds of subjects each. For a realistic constraint, we’ll say that each person is limited to 10 subjects because of memory, politics, hunger, etc. So, even if we allocated just one minute per person, per subject, per week, that would be 880 minutes per month! And, let’s be honest– no subject is ever one minute or less. Realistically, we’d be looking at five times that, 4400 minutes– or (shudder) more.

That’s not all! Think about how much money we’d all be donating to the telcos! Smell that? That’s 96,800 minutes worth of money burning.

Now do you understand the uber-importance of this blog? We have a dire need for communication in this family. This didn’t exactly come to me in a moment of truth. It was more like hours. On the phone. Helping people post. Some people get paid for doing that. A few lucky people known as tech support people. It occurs to me, however, that most tech support time is given away for free to friends and family. But I digress…

Inevitably, during all of my tech-support calls with people living outside the state of Washington, everybody’s top question was, “So did you find a place to live?” Several times I was tempted to say, “No, I moved back in with my parents,” but that wouldn’t worked to well on my family. In any case, the answer is both “Yes” and “No”. I did not find a place to live, but I am still living in a “place”. That place is my same apartment in Bellevue.

Pictured above is a panorama view of my room. It hasn’t changed too much, but I wanted to show off my cool setup, or my crazy mess. Picture below are my two roommates, Fraz and Wes, respectively. Kudos to them! They pay 2/3 of the bills.

user: batman
pass: batman9er