Up for a HuffFamily Reunion next July?

Hey guys!

So when Karen was here she mentioned that one of her friends has an "at home" vacation w/ all of her kids. I guess once her kids starting having kids they started to plan more relaxed vacations at the grandparent's house. Anyways it sounded great to me & Ian. I mean we're probably not going to be taking our daughter to Colorado this spring for the annual ski trip but we still want to see you all in the near future. Also we're going to see the parents this Christmas but we won't get any Laura & Jon time this holiday season. :(

Here is the plan:
(1.) Pick a week we can all make it to the padre's house
(2.) Show up & relax by the lake ( ski, relax, swim, relax, play board games. relax ... you get the idea. ) :)

We can even try to plan a few Detroit activities if people want to. I really want to see Diego's murals at the art museum. However the whole relaxing by the lake & hanging out w/ my fam is the part of this vacation that sounds the best to me. :)

Drop a note if this sounds good to you. Also let us know what dates are good. I've always been the limiting reagent on our vacation time so now that I'm no longer working it should be much easier to plan vacations (Ian gets a decent amount of vacation time). :) Can't wait to see you all again.

~ Liz

What's cool now?

We just learned that herbs in drinks are cool. As in, popular. We've been trying to reproduce a few recipes from restaurants that we've either tried or read about, with some success. We just went out to our fav place and had a peach habanero martini, but we haven't tried that one yet. However, we altered a great recipe from Martha Stewart that you should all try (if you're not pregnant, sorry!). But it's a fun summer drink.

Watermelon Basil Margarita
1/4 watermelon - dice some and put them in the freezer to freeze for ice cubes in the drink.
Add chunks of remaining watermelon to blender with a little water and puree - pour through strainer until you have a few cups of watermelon juice. In a separate cup or measuring cup, add 2-3 oz. tequila and 1 oz. triple sec or contreau per drink. Add a handful of slightly crushy basil leaves and muddle them around with a spoon, let sit for a few minutes to infuse.
Put watermelon ice cubes in a margarita glass. Shake or chill watermelon juice and infused liquor together and pour into glasses. Top with sprig of basil.

Original recipe is here, but it's a little odd. They use a 7 # watermelon for 3 cups juice (we got that with less than 1/4 watermelon) and 6 oz. tequila for the whole mess. We like our proportions better!

Halo testing

Here is a neat wired article on the testing that Bungie and Microsoft are doing with Halo 3. Pretty cool stuff.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo?currentPage=all

~Ian

GenCon - we have returned!

We realized this was our fifth GenCon, which is pretty cool! And despite being awake on Friday from about 3:30am to 2:30 am, we had a great time... There are some pics on a web album to check out. Some are just minis we thought were cool in various cases. Jon also did an Infinity tournament, so there are a few photos of that, and demoed at the Heroscape booth. We took a lot of pics of new items at the Heroscape booth and our favorite minis companies.
We did play the HaloClix game - Jon like it more than I, but it was pretty fun. They had a huge vehicle thingie (I don't know Halo) as a raffle giveaway, and some Halo guys dressed up. But other than that and a few demo tables, it was pretty low key. They did not have figs displayed other than the ones being used in the demos. I'm guessing that since the game isn't actually available for purchase yet they didn't give it quite the splash they might have. If you want to see photos of the HaloClix that were there, check here.
The pics of lined-up painted minis are from the speed painting finals. Jon and I entered a Rackham painting contest - $1.50 entry gets you a fig to keep and 45 minutes to paint it, in heats with about 16 others. I came in 4th place, and Jon came in 3rd, which he was very excited about! So he got to go to the finals, and paint an elf, which is in the picture (his has the orangish robe). Very cool...
Other than that, we demoed a bunch of games. We bought Tannhauser, a board game with minis combat in a sort of alt-WWII setting. We also bought a lot of Rackham figs at 50% off since they didn't want to cart them back to France at the end of the con.
The picture in this post was taken at a new game company who had an "angel" there, and they printed the photos for you. I can probably get a better picture later. We are both wearing our "bling" gold chains that were given to us by the guy leading one of our events. We got tons of comments, which is weird since there are people dressed up in many odd ways at GenCon. I saw a Tuskan Raider wandering around with his "head" in his hands, 2 Darth Vaders staring each other down, a sad Captain America who was overshadowed by someone's cool homemade superhero costume, and lots of Ren-Faire costumes. I am wearing a pirate bandana from the Privateer Press people, which is another minis game we're always tempted to buy. So I felt very swash buckly all day.
We enjoyed the free breakfast at the hotel, and we did 3 events to learn the new Rackham Roleplaying Game, Cadwallon. All in all, it was a very pleasing convention. We got home and crashed on Sunday night, and did a little sorting through the loot. So now we have a few new games to play, and we're even further behind on our minis painting! Sigh...

Scanner Monster

This is a picture of my "scanner monster" at work. The fabric was a paint sample we did for Mirror of the Invisible World that didn't get used. Our other assistant added the eyes (with big eyelashes - we have stuff like that lying around at work!). And our designer added the tongue.

Even better- the scanner makes loud squeaky noises when it scans, and the "mouth" really opens, so it's pretty great!