Desert Bus and Other Holiday Activities

Once a year, our favorite Canadian comedy troupe holds a fundraiser for Child's Play charity. (If you are unfamiliar with Child's Play, their page can be found here.) The troupe: Loading Ready Run. The fundraiser: Desert Bus for Hope. It boils down to a week-long telethon where the crew and friends auction off fun stuff (including fan-submitted art and craft projects), sing songs and dance, take phone calls from "internet people" and other geek celebrities, and just have a good time. This year, they raised nearly $400,000 over six days, which is really impressive considering five years ago when they started they were hoping to come out with a few thousand dollars.

We caught a fair amount of it this year. It's one of those things one can turn on and leave running in the background. Our attention did perk up whenever they had a live auction or did a song-and-dance number. We were amazed to see some of the craft items sold for three or four thousand dollars. It was great to see the good will of so many people. Which brings me to my thesis: The best part of Desert Bus is the community they build. Naomi and I felt like we could crawl through the screen, find some space on the couch, and hang out with these people. It's hard to say that about a lot of folks.

Anyways, I think Naomi pretty well covered Thanksgiving weekend. All I have to say is I didn't think there would be many folks at Jo-Ann Fabric on Friday morning. The siren call of inexpensive fabric and cheap picture frames drew in quite the crowd though.

We went to the Decagon Family Christmas party on Thursday. There were nearly three hundred people in attendance, with one hundred employees and their families. Understand that most parties at Decagon are just a pretense for dessert contests. Yes, the prime rib, tenderloin, and ham were great, but the real party is in the selection of over a hundred kinds of pie, cake, cookie, torte, trifle, and brownie. A perennial favorite are Uncle Russ's jalapeño brownies.

Baby Peri certainly had a good time. She got to see all the great people at work who ask me about her two or three times a day. She got to wear her sparkly Christmas dress (which I guess is a thing little girls get to do) and she got to sit with Santa (who used to deliver my mail when I lived on Gaines Rd.) Santa's photography elves haven't gotten their shots back to us, but Peri sure did look cute.

We bought her a Bumbo chair and a jungle play set so as to better facilitate her "hanging out" with us. Now Peri can sit at the table with us when we do crafts, like making ornaments as a family.