Today I went to get our mail and…
It would appear some new Ticket to Ride fun is in order! (More about Alvin & Dexter)
Today I went to get our mail and…
It would appear some new Ticket to Ride fun is in order! (More about Alvin & Dexter)
Over the weekend, some friends joined us for an impromptu get-together to play Ticket to Ride. After all, it's January, it's cold, it's full of doldrums… why not play a boardgame which takes you to exotic cities… like Duluth?
The 11 of us played every one of our TtR games, including the original USA version (with the USA 1910 Expansion), Europe (with the Europa 1912 Expansion featuring Warehouses & Depots), Switzerland, and Nordic Countries.
Today Amy & I had our yearly physicals at the doctor's office. I had to get some blood work done. As everyone who knows me knows… I just hate needles and blood!
However, the nurse taking the blood thought I was a "big boy" for not crying and gave me some stickers as a reward! I got Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, and Thomas & Friends.
Continuing a tradition we started in 2006… and continued in 2008 and 2009, Amy and I thought it would be fun to post a few photos from each month to create a photo recap of what we've experienced, written about, and shared with all of you over the past year. We're sourcing the photos from our personal blog at SteveandAmySly.com, our beverage review site at BevReview.com, and for the first time, our odd site about Disney trash cans, MagicalTrash.com.
We didn't blog as much in the early part of the year, but then we relaunched our personal site using WordPress in August, which accelerated things once again and enabled the use of larger images. At the same time, we started actively posting on MagicalTrash.com using the Tumblr platform. Because of that, our posts were distributed across many sites.
Looking back, we posted a total of 80 personal blog stories this year, including 985 images, in addition to 73 beverage-related reviews and 42 trash can-related posts. Yeah, we've been busy on the blogs!
Enjoy the recap and thanks for reading!
January
Not sure this is real or a hoax (Update: It's real!), but what if you added monsters to the world of Ticket to Ride? Either the folks at Days of Wonder have a screw loose or this idea for this "Alvin & Dexter" expansion might actually be brilliant!
A forum user at BoardGameGeek.com discovered this product being listed on Japanese site AmiAmi.jp, an online retailer for miniature figures. If this does play out to be a real expansion, it's quite an unexpected twist for the TtR world created by Days of Wonder. However, given that I'm a huge fan of the series, any expansion is welcomed these days.
Featured Foods: Pudding, pumpkin pie
Our journey through a Culinary Christmas has come to an end, and what do we end up with? Pudding and pumpkin pie!
We may all know the classic song "Over the River and Through the Woods" but probably not in the way that it's performed today by Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters. The song is expanded and modified to have more of a Christmas theme in this 1951 recording of A Merry Christmas At Grandmother's. I thought the journey to eat food with loved ones was a fitting way to wrap up our theme of this year's Steve's 25 Days of Christmas Music.
We got snow on Christmas Eve here in Chicago, so Amy and I took a walk around the neighborhood. Here are some things we observed — when we weren't throwing snowballs at each other…
Amy & I continued our 4-year Christmas tradition of watching White Christmas at the Music Box Theatre as part of their annual Christmas Show.
It's a fun time where they not only show the movie, but also have a visit from Santa, group caroling, and all-around Chicago holiday fun. (For those interested, recap posts from our Christmas show visits in 2008 and 2009.)
The Music Box has been putting on a double billing of White Christmas/It's A Wonderful Life for 27 years and it seems to be getting more and more popular.
Featured Foods: Figgy pudding
My favorite version of We Wish You A Merry Christmas is performed by John Denver & The Muppets, and we featured that track back in 2002. During the song, Miss Piggy confuses the reference to "Figgy pudding" as "Piggy pudding" and has a little conniption. It's all quite delightful.
However, since we've already used that version, I present to you this track by Roger Whittaker. There are no pigs mentioned, but he sure does make a big deal about figgy pudding. You hear it a lot… and even in a round! Personally, the stuff sounds amazingly gross.
Once upon a time there was a small, rural town by the name of Sawyerville. With all the main industries long gone, to help their tax base they attempted to refocus their promotional ventures towards tourism.
Noting Hollywood's creatively-bankrupt strategy of making every possible movie in 3D to produce inflated ticket prices, the town's Chamber of Commerce thought they could do something similar.