Author Archives: Brian Alvey

Jack and I played in the backyard for an hour two days ago. Our backyard was covered in a foot of snow with a layer of hard frozen snow on top. Jack walked across it with no trouble, but most of the time when I took a step my foot went through. Jack played onContinue reading “Having a blast with Jack”

Twitter is this crazy new service for teenage girls that let’s them update their friends all day long so everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s like the status message on your IM client, but instead of changing between “Idle” and “Away” and “Online” you can tell your friends that you are “going shopping,” “gettingContinue reading “Putting the twit in Twitter”

If a store has a big international cheese section, I usually poke around and look for my favorite Norwegian cheese, Nökkelost. It’s a light yellow cow’s milk cheese with caraway seeds in it. Sadly, the most popular Norwegian cheese is Gjetost, a nasty medium brown goat’s milk cheese. My mom was trying to get me toContinue reading “C’est cheese”

So I’m no longer a comic book convention virgin. (Hmm, there’s got to be a joke in that line somewhere. Maybe it’s too obvious.) NYCC was a blast — the perfect way to spend a weekend while your family is out of town. I got to cross three more comic giants off of my listContinue reading “Conventional wisdom”

This weekend I got to meet a bunch of my comic creator heroes at the New York Comic Con. It all started with me saying a quick hi to Stan Lee in the hallway where he was heading to audition a dozen new costumed heroes for his upcoming round of Who Wants To Be a Superhero? SinceContinue reading “Meeting comics legends”

I caught some of the game on the radio on the way to one of Jack’s friends’ houses. I saw bits and pieces of the game, probably none of the more significant plays, but we had a great time with the kids. I saw a few seconds of Prince’s half-time performance and I’m pretty sureContinue reading “Anonymous Rex”

One of the great things about a wedding or birthday party is that you get to do a crowd mashup, taking people from all the different areas of your life — work, school, families and beyond — and slamming them together. We had a party for Jack’s fourth birthday yesterday and afterwards some of theContinue reading “Walks of life”

We have some balloons floating around the house from some kids thing we went to recently. They are the metallized nylon or foil kind that you see in hospitals (often wrongly called Mylar balloons), not the choking-hazard balloon animal kind and they have kids characters on them like SpongeBob and Dora. Jack said something to me aboutContinue reading “I Love Wiki”

We should have been home from our trip by midnight last night, but we got home closer to 4am. There were delays leaving Colorado and then even more once we were in Chicago. It could have been way worse, but both boys were fantastic considering the circumstances and we spent the whole trip with our favoriteContinue reading “Colorado getaway, getaway”