charlesbreland.com

All right, here are some photo’s of Brian Folse’s movie party – the premise; everyone dresses up like a character from a movie. btw, this party was held on folse’s birthday, but he denies having thrown himself a self-birthday party and instead insists it was just a scheduling conflict. anyway on with the pics….

that’s my boss and his wife. alison (spelling??) has flair. dave? not so much. however, to be completely clear, that is a bagel in his pants and he is not just happy to see you.

here’s em and me.

it was a stretch, but i went as “the jerk.” em was legally blonde. on a related note, who knew from watching “legally blonde” what an amazing performance reese would turn in as june carter cash? i think the male equivalent would be following up a “liberace” bio-pic with one about winston churchill.

and now a video of some people who aren’t necessarily good dancers.

speaking of dancing, here’s one from after my company christmas party of a couple of people you may recognize. jessica and emily are, of course, professionally trained hip hop/r&b dancers. dave is wearing the remnants of an “irish car bomb” on his shirt. mmmmmm, tasty!!

Sam is receiving full media coverage over at www.curfman.net, but i figured we should also give him some play here as well. here are some of sam’s bday photos.

here ma, pa, and baby sam hang out in anticipation of the next good nose cleaning

here i am teaching him to signal a touchdown (or a made field goal or pat). sam quickly picked this up, as he knew the importance of being ready for spring football practice.

to be completely fair though, it did take him a couple of weeks to learn the difference between offsides and illegal procedure – but i don’t think that’s anything to worry about.

one last pic of mom and baby here.

sam is now about 6 weeks old and is currently 5 feet tall.

Em and I joined Doug and MC, Drew and Blake and Rick and Rhoda up the Allvine cabin for New Years. Doug managed to put me to work chopping wood for his fire pit, and then we all fixed dinner and played some Guesstures

first of all, let me start by saying that i believe that drew has suffered one too many concussions.

the game was pretty exciting in general. here you can see em is VERY excited about getting to play

blake went first and here showed a great representation of….well, i’m not sure what it was.

maybe i should mention that guesstures is like charades, so just a lot of waving your arms and motioning. aaaaand, nobody waved their arms like mc, who really did look like this – her arms were moving so fast.

guesstures is a difficult game sometimes….here mc asks herself, “what clue can i possibly give to help the girls team win?”

emily, didn’t like this word at all

and rhonda’s word actually caused her physical pain

oh, btw, buzz was there too, but he didn’t play guesstures. if i had to guess, though, i’d say this look is communicating the wistful memory of a love lost long ago.

drew was a guesstures all star. here he gives a charade that is unmistakeably a puppet show

btw, the sockpuppet in the forground is really just my sock.

oh, i mentioned before that drew has had one too many concussions, right? well, here just as i’m about to take a lovely picture of drew and blake, drew apparently remembers something he had forgotten.

the best performance of the night was by doug, who could discern no good way of displaying the word “Polish”. afterwards he let us know that it was a word no man could have guesstured. that seemed likely until drew suggested the word might be “polish”. we all thought that was pretty funny, and drew temporarily lost use of his legs he was laughing so hard.

doug tried to explain his “Polish”ness away, but we weren’t buying it

mc shared in the laughter as well

we then went outside to the fire pit. the fire wasn’t quite big enough, so doug poured gasoline on it. here the girls flee the ensuing inferno.

no eyebrows were lost in the making of this blog, however.

em liked the fire (once it had settled back down)

and so did the allvines

all in all, it was a great, relaxing new years and a wonderful opportunity to spend time in the company of good friends!