BurnsFamily Blog

We spent the weekend before Christmas visiting area Holiday light displays. Specifically,  light shows choreographed to music transmitted over the radio.

You can see a map of the homes we visited here.

Campbell

Harriet Ave. (link)

A good, local display. It wasn’t as artistically choreographed as the others below, but it had a lot of “elements” to look at. Audio quality needed some work, but Bill’s probably overly critical in that department.

San Jose

Happy Holiday Home (link)

This house has put on a light show for several holidays, but it was the first time we saw it … so we though it was nice .  There is a lot of stuff packed into a small yard! Because their neighbors (God love ‘em) don’t participate, their little yard gets REALLY BRIGHT during some of the more intense sequences.

Glacier Lights (link)

According to the newspaper article we read about them, this is their 3rd year. Two engineers got together and talked themselves into doing a combined-house light show. Neat! They’ve quickly become one of the bigger light shows in the area, with 70,000+ lights. Theirs is unique in that they add a carpet of lights to their lawns, it kinda looks like a huge piano keyboard. Very nice show, and well synchronized (I’ve heard that creating the “program” to synchronize the lights to the music takes anywhere from 2 to 20 hours for each song.) They have a short show, with 3 songs each night. They also accept donations for the Make a Wish Foundation (nice).

While watching the display one rainy night, we found ourselves standing next to the owner of one of the houses; he’s a really nice guy who loves putting on the display for others to enjoy. A true engineer at heart, he says that he’s always tweaking the programs after watching it for a while each night. He told us we can “expect big things” for next year. We can’t wait!

Sunnyvale

Bryan Ave. (link)

This house puts on a a small display, but it’s got a very clean layout. One thing we noticed after touring house light displays is that it really does make a difference when the owners take the time to lay out the lights carefully. The “randomly thrown” lights just don’t look as nice, even when they compensate by adding LOTS of lights.  They collect donations for Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.

BlueBonnetLights (link)

Impressive…but almost overwhelming! This neighborhood got together and four houses have tied their light controllers together! Each house has a different layout and theme, but all four houses’ lights are synchronized together. Unfortunately, the result is a little on the tacky side.

Hamma House (link)

This display is new this year, but it’s very nice! Nicely laid out, good synchronization. They have a decent-size yard, so they have the space to add more lights. We can see lots of potential for future years…it’s an “up and comer”!

Severns-Pease Xmas Display (link)

The grand-daddy of San Jose light displays. Chances are, you’ve seen this house on an HGTV or DIY-TV special. This is the 7th consecutive year of synchronized/computerized. This is another setup where 2 houses work together to create their display, program their controllers, and string up the lights. All 77,000+ of them! You can’t really appreciate how many lights that is until you see other shows that don’t have that many.

Probably because they’ve been doing this for so long, they also have a very long show…it’s over an hour long! They recently added a fake snow machine that uses some sort of magical soap which leaves no slippery residue. They have a traditional Christmas show, and a Rock ‘n’ Roll show. Wow!

They collect canned food and donations for Second Harvest Food Bank, and donations up to $500 each are matched by the Foundation that one of the owner runs. Last year they collected over $46,000! This show ROCKS, and it’s very tastefully done. It’s a”must see”, but bring some hot chocolate or mulled cider and prepare to stay a while.

Only suggestion we have: increase the modulation on their FM radio signal; it’s too low for some hand-held transistor radios to pick up.

It is that time of year. Everyone seems to be in the kitchen. We did our traditional giving of Christmas candy. This year was Peppermint Fudge, Almond Brittle and Toffee. The last tin was delivered this afternoon.

Today has been a day of cooking to prepare for tomorrow. The cranberry sauce is completed and so is the French Toast Casserole with Peaches. Still have to make the pumpkin pie.

The french toast casserole is a new tradition for us that started last year. It is a super easy recipe to put together the day before and then cook in the morning. No fuss, no muss. I was well into my diet last December, but still wanted to celebrate. This recipe was in the San Jose paper, but is actually a recipe from a woman from Kansas; Kathy Manweiler from the Wichita Eagle. She has some fun recipes. If you don’t need to go the diet route you can always use whole eggs instead of egg whites and use fuller fat milk. I really like it the way it is, so no substitutes for me. If you live on the west coast you have to search for a whole grain raisin bread, No Pepperidge Farm here. I have to search each year. This year I was not successful, but it will still be yummy.

French Toast Casserole with Peaches

Serves 8 = 5 pts/Serving

2   bags (1 pound each) frozen peach slices (unsweetened, not in syrup)
1/2   cup water
1/4   cup Sugar
2   tablespoons cornstarch
Cooking spray
1   (1-pound) loaf of Pepperidge Farm Whole Grain Cinnamon and Raisin bread, cut into 1-inch cubes, or a similar loaf
1 1/2   cups EggBeaters
1 1/2   cups fat-free milk
1   tablespoon pure vanilla extract
2   teaspoons cinnamon

Combine frozen peaches, water, Sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan, and cook over low to medium heat, stirring often, until mixture is thickened and bubbly.

Lightly coat a 9×13-inch baking dish with cooking spray. Put half of the peach sauce in a storage container and refrigerate it. Cover the bottom of the baking dish with the other half of the peach sauce. Scatter the cubes of bread on top of the peach sauce.

In a medium bowl, whisk together EggBeaters, milk, vanilla and cinnamon. Pour the egg mixture over the bread cubes evenly. Tamp down the bread with a spatula to thoroughly soak each piece of bread in the egg mixture. Cover baking dish with aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning, slide the dish into a cold oven with the foil on. Turn oven on to 350 degrees. After baking for 25 minutes, remove the foil and bake 20 more minutes. While the casserole is baking, warm up remaining peach sauce in the microwave or in a saucepan on the stove. (Times and temperatures vary depending on your microwave.)

Let the casserole stand 5 minutes before serving. Top each serving with a generous spoonful of warm peach sauce.

Enjoy!

In a dryer?!? No, silly! (Yeah, that’s what I thought too…) Read more … »

If you read our post on grilled pizza, you know we like to put fresh chopped basil on our pizzas. The problem has been buying basil that lasts long enough in the fridge to be useful for more than one pizza at a time. When we created the landscaping design, one of the goals was to plan our own vegetables and herbs: “edibles”. (Historical: Here’s the build-out stage and the barren, but finalized edibles garden.)

Because we finished the edibles garden in the middle of the hot, dry  season the promise of home-grown veges and fruits will have to wait until next year.

So we buy “live” basil plants at the supper market, we try to grow them indoors, and within 2 weeks they start to shrivel up, attract bugs, then die. Read more … »

We’ll have to find a picture of what the inside of the pipes looked like. The incoming water supply lines were the original pipes…70 years old. Galvanized steel? Iron? Over time, that type of pipe collects sediment inside that adheres to the inner walls. Over time, the pipe becomes restricted. In our case, there was less than a pencil’s thickness for water to flow through it. Read more … »

Bill and his friend Dave decided to learn to surf. I mean, we only live 30 minutes or so from the Pacific Ocean, and ALL of the cool kids are doin’ it! Besides…how hard can it be?!?

It turns out, it’s not really that hard. But I think I had a few mitigating factors at play here…I do a fair amount of “core strengthening” exercises regularly, I also have very good balance, am in fairly decent shape, and can snowboard.

It turns out that surfing is very similar to snowboarding. But there a lot of people who surf but don’t snowboard (and vice verse). The notion of standing sideways on something that’s moving forward, and tipping your center of granvity side-to-side to advuse its course does take a little getting used to.

That said, I was able to stand up and “ride” a wave into shore a few times. The waves were fairly mild that day, so I don’t think I should declare myself a “surfer” yet. Read more … »

We were lucky enough to have the whole family get together and “ride the rapids” this year. Awesomely good time. Here’s a few pictures, although I forgot to capture the “Boat Eating Log” and “Eddy Currents of Doom”. Surprisingly, there were no capsizings this year.

Pictures after the jump: Read more … »

We are a little late posting these photos, but we couldn’t be happier. Back in rainy January we decided to do a little cleanup in the garage until it was dry enough to work on the yard. For good or bad, the rainy weather didn’t last long and the garage project lingered.

Our plan was a quick insulate and drywall project. This would help with appearance and temperature management. Things were going pretty quickly until we got to the mudding and taping. That really slowed us down. But once the yard work was done, we put our full concentration on the garage. We finished the drywall and then hopeful that the epoxy will make the floors a little easier to keep clean. It was easy to apply, although we had to get up at 5 in the morning to do it. Of course the week we wanted to finish the garage we were in the middle of a heatwave and the paint sets up very quickly in high heat. At 5 in the morning we were at 72* so we had an hour and a half to mix and apply the epoxy. We finished in just about an hour.

Next up was putting everything back in the room. Julie got out the graph paper and drew up the room and each of the items that needed to go into the garage. With a little bit of time and playing around we were able to find room for all the tools and bikes and stuff and still have a little bit of room for Bill’s car.

We still have one picture to take, the one with Bill’s car in the garage, but it looks so nice and clean right now.

We consciously picked plants and trees that would were “native” to California climates so that they would thrive with little-to-no fussing. We also picked specimens that would attract birds, bees, and butterflies. Read more … »

L.A. had a 5.4 (moderate) earthquake around Noon today. To folks who aren’t familiar with earthquakes, you can certainly feel one of those but modern-built structures typically are unaffected. The Richter scale is logarithmic, so a 4.0 is 1/10th the energy of a 5.0, for example. The USGS says that the Bay Area is overdue for a “big one” (meaning, something around a 7.6 — so ~100x more powerful than the one felt in L.A. today). The Bay Area had a 5.9 on Halloween 2007. There are 800 5.0-5.9 EQs every year, according to the USGS.

FEMA advises that in a crisis you should plan to be on your own for at least 3 full days. When your cellphone, landline, and internet access goes down, how will you communicate? Read more … »