Birthday Month.

I started birthday month by driving to Manhattan.  Betsy called on the way to tell me about my birthday present.  One that is due in August.
I managed to stay on the road and made it to Dan's lab in time to watch him work his Madgic.

Then we explored to backwoods of Manhattan and ate some Cuban food and gave Susan and Steven a ride to the basketball game and watched the 'Cats defeat our first President in basketball form and that was about it 'cause we're old like that.

The next day I drove to Witchita. I stopped to see George Custer's tree, which like Custer is dead, but unlike Custer is still on display.

I stopped at some sort of Flint Hills informational kiosk.  There were some Geese there too.

There was some interesting literature.

Then I had lunch with Kent and Heath and then spent the afternoon with Kent transferring car seats and then I went back over to Heath's for supper.

Heath made me a steak by the light of his LED headband and then I was stumped by a grade school math enrichment exercise and then Heath and Jacob obliterated me at Halo and then I a nice time catching up with Heath and Jenny.

And then I spent the next morning at Kent's hanging with the fam and witnessing unspeakable cruelties to li'l Parker so she could "breathe" or some kind of nonsense like that.

And then I drove to Margaret's to watch K-State win their 10th game of the season which was incredibly awesome but apparently not very picturesque.

Then we headed to Stillwater for the Bedlam game.  Jim stopped to rinse of the car so it wouldn't stick out so bad among the fancy-pants-park-right-next-to-the-stadium-big-donor-cars.

The car wash was next to a Sonic.

I put off the taking off of my purple for as long as possible.

But I finally relented. With my camo K-state cap and my orange poor old lu shirt and a W-C in one hand and a pistol in the other I was off to see how the other half watches football.  (In retrospect, I really, really wish I had A. shaved, and B. packed a much nicer orange shirt to wear. The other half does not dress like they are attending a football game when they are attending a football game.)

 Anyhoo here is the magic pass into the lap of luxury which Jim wore to the game.

And so we traveled up an elevator, through the seven layers of the candy cane forest, past the swanky and crowded club level, through the sea of swirly-twirly gumdrops, and then up a nondescript staircase and entered the enchanted football home of T. Boone Pickens. The pictures are not great because I didn't want to use my flash for fear of drawing attention to myself, being recognized as a purple-bleeding-peasant-usurper and summarily dismissed.

We went first to the President's box, where I was promptly introduced to Mr. Boone Pickens himself. It was weird. And apparently I can yes-man right along with the best of them. Ha ha ha! Yes! That is a very good point! You are correct sir! Ha ha! Yes!

Here is a view out the window. Notice the bran-new "BOONE PICKENS STADIUM" sign. It was a surprise, apparently.

 After Jim had sufficiently worked the room and I had been introduced to several dignitaries as "Levi's Uncle" we headed down to watch the first quarter at Jim's usual box of choice.  We sat right above the "N" in the "BOONE PICKENS STADIUM" sign.

At the quarter we raced back to the President's box to eat. It was glorious.

They had this sweet blowup of an old K-State program.

And look, there is me.

Jim spent pretty much the whole rest of the game talking to people. 'Cause he's important. And likes people. Having reached my small talk quota for the year I did my best to stay out of the way and watch the game.  There was a lot of picture making inside the President's box.  Here is Jim's boss getting her picture made.  Jim and I also got our picture made, but I am not sure why.

At some point we got some ice cream, which was Jim's favorite part, I think.

I had some novelty chocolate.

And Jim fetched Jo and Spencer in the 4th quarter.

Everybody seemed very excited about the game ending.

We watched along with Jim's boss as the crowd tried desperately to find a way out of the stadium with the goalposts.  They failed.

The next day I drove home. It was very exciting to see we had gotten a nice rain while I was gone.

We also picked up a new cat, apparently.

For a while we were trying to keep Katie corralled in the living room.

But she thwarted all of our best laid plans.

One morning we had a freezing fog.

And we had lunch with the girls' Godmothers before going to tubaChristmas.

I played some timpani for a couple of Christmas concerts. And drums for a praise night.

I looked some at the wheat over east, but not too closely.

It finally got warm enough to dump out the rain gauges. During the summer 0.40" of rain is pretty disappointing, but it is actually a very nice amount to get in December.

Sisters.

Anna had a guest appearance at a  Christmas concert too.

And we got another nice shower.

And I discovered the downside of putting calcium chloride in the combine tires.

Anna had another concert performance.

Which Papa and Grammy and Katie all enjoyed.

 Anna posed after the show with her favorite teacher.

One day I made Katie's bed all by myself. And I only had to redo it the one time to retrieve her book.

One day, in lieu of Birthday Movie with Linda, we drove to Manhattan on our way to Missouri.  We were s'posed to get there nice and early to relax for the evening.  Instead it took us two hours to make it out of town.

We made it to Mizzou the next day anyways and saw Susan graduate.  It was pretty fun after the graduation part was over.

And then the next day we were going to drive back to Manhattan again for relaxing, but they decided to schedule a blizzard, so we drove all the way home instead.

It took me all morning Monday morning in the rain to get my blizzard prep done since I had left the 2-way radio on in the Puma.

 But I was already in a good mood by the time the snow started.

The next day we went out to check out the new snow. Here is Anna's attempt:

And with our edits.

I was pretty disappointed with the 6-7" of snow until I got out in it.  It was about the wettest snow I've ever seen.  I took a sample about 6.5" deep and melted it and looky:

That's a lot of water for a 6.5" snow, folks. (The average for snow is about 1" moisture per 10" of snow.)

Snow makes everything better.

Although it did make The Hollow [Milo] seem that much more hollow.

It was a pretty good Birthday present.

And Anna got an extra long Christmas break.

And then it was Birthday time. There were presents.

And there was pizza.

And there was a movie.

 

And  there was Pa Rum Pa Pa Pum.

And a third church service for good measure.

Spencer (who had come for a visit) even drove his car into a snowbank to put just the right finishing touch on Birthday Month.