Here is a photo from last Friday night when the Grover clan got together for a nice dinner with Grandpa at Silverado. Everyone had a really nice time and it was fun to see Grandpa and laugh and visit with everyone! I'm sure my Dad will add some more photos too. - Heather



For those of you who are interested, Tom finished the sprint Triathlon in about an hour and 15 minutes on Saturday. He was pretty happy with that time for his first one. He swam for 350 meters, biked 12 miles and ran 6.1 miles.

Latest Book

A month has passed and still nobody posting but me. Hmmm. Here's the latest for the book collection. I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg and reformatted it in Word. It's 8 inches high and 4 inches across, about 200 pages all together. The cover title plate is also a Word creation.

The next additions to the bookshelf will be a collection of classic horror stories ... Dracula, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde to start with.

Food Porn

Seems like everybody is giving up on this blog ... here's something new for ya.  We had carnitas for dinner the other night.  Since I had leftover pork, raw torillas and all the other good stuff, but not enough for everybody to make tacos, I made Mexican ravioli instead. The kids scraped everything off of course.

For anybody who might be considering the book business, I put this one together to see what the actual time & cost was.  

This is about 9x6, 398 pages (heavy bond paper).  Etsy has about 180 pages of blank journals; based on what I saw, this one I might be able to sell for $50.  Cost of goods was $18.50, total hands-on time about 3.5 hours.  That would make my hourly rate $9.00.

The first book I posted is bigger, about 10x7 but it is also made of a nicer paper for the text block.  Half the number of pages but 3.5 times the material cost.  I'd have to sell that one for about $70 to make my $9/hour.

So they're interesting to make and unique to give away, but I can't quit my day job.  Dang.

Here's the latest book for anybody who might be interested.  It's sewn on cords and quarterbound in leather (salvaged bomber jacket).  I was planning to keep this one for myself but I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Happy New Year!

Woo hoo! 2009 is here at last. Hopefully it will be a nice, quiet, peaceful year.
Tom gave the kids a giant bubble making kit for Christmas. Here are a couple of giant bubbles for you.

Merry Christmas from the frozen wastelands of the North.  I don't know how much new snow we received last night, but the wind definitely rearranged the foot we received on Monday.

Since it's Christmas, there have to be cinnamon rolls.