Walt Disney World shut down this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but that didn’t stop three Rausch kids from trying to make their dreams come true. “I SPY Rausch Kids on Vacation” is our theme this year. Can you find Ian, Ainsley and Remy in our map of The Happiest Place on Earth?
Christmas Card 2019
Have you ever had a moment where it seems like all the pieces of the puzzle of life just fall into place? That’s how we felt after we welcomed the newest member of our family: Remy Valentine Rausch. We lovingly placed the words necessary to describe our crazy, happy, momentous year on a beautiful grid… and then lost all the letters!
No, we’re just kidding. That’s not what really happened. What happened is that we built a crossword puzzle app from scratch where the answers are significant moments from our 2019! Enjoy!!
Christmas Card 2018 Autopsy
We recently announced our 2018 Christmas Card. Every year, my wife and I design and develop a digital Christmas card. These cards are opportunities to explore new technologies or techniques, and they usually turn into more trouble than they seem to be worth.
In this post, I’ll dissect the process and product of our Christmas Card. View the card at 2018ccard.now.sh. Check out the code on GitHub at awayken/2018-christmas-card.
Continue reading “Christmas Card 2018 Autopsy”Christmas Card 2018
Pop Quiz, hot shot! How well do you know the Miles Rausch Family in 2018? Take our Christmas Card Quiz. There may just be a special reveal about our little something new coming in April!
Christmas Card 2017
Merry Christmas! The 2017 Rausch Family Christmas Card is here!
ESCAPE from the MAZE PLANET! It’s a text adventure where you play as Fruckles, a lovable alien pet who helps Kiddo and Sweets make decisions along their adventure.
Can you escape the maze planet? Will you turn around in shame? There’s more than one way out, so feel free to play over and over again.
Christmas Card 2016
2016 was quite a year for changes for the kids: they both began attending a new school, they both began a weekly extra-curricular, and they both discovered Pokémon Go. Well, we pretty quickly knew what should be the theme of this year’s card: Rauschémon Go! Catch us all to learn what’s new in 2016.
2011 Christmas Card
2011 has been another crazy year, and our lives haven’t gotten any less hectic – or fantastic. One of our life-changing updates this year was the purchase of our first home. The process was certainly a roller coaster, but our love for the new home has not been. It’s already become a very major part of our lives, especially as Ian continues to grow up and explore his new home.
This year, for our Christmas Card, we invite you to explore our new home through the memories we’ve made there. You’ll see a few of the rooms of our house. In each room, you’ll find some Christmas ornaments. Hover on the ornament to see a video clip, photograph, or other memory that took place in that room. We promise they’re adorable.
Happy Birthday, Dad!
To celebrate, a short poem:
I hope 51
is much more fun
than 49
and 2 combined.
Happy New Year!
Well, it’s a new year. Truth be told, I’m a little wary of this year. 2010 had such beautiful mathematical properties. 2011 just seems… off. However, 2011, has a ton of promise, with a lot of big things coming up.
To launch this year, I’ve put up a new mixlist. Actually, I put up two. I just realized that I never posted my 2009 Best Of… mixlist. So, I made pages for both of them. I didn’t dig into the songs as deeply as with the 2008 Best Of…, so don’t expect to read much on those pages. Also included were the Grooveshark embedded players.
And now, to sleep. Perchance to dream. Likely to have to get up three or four times with my son.
It’s New Year’s Eve and, so far, most …
It’s New Year’s Eve and, so far, most of our conversation has been about snowflakes. It’s a long story.
We’re about to watch 9. We had a couple plans for tonight – one was to watch episodes from our favorite TV shows that take place during New Year’s Eve. That is a fine idea until you endeavor to figure out which episodes those might be. IMDB plot searches proved fruitless.
The next plan was to watch a movie that takes place, at least in part, during New Year’s Eve. This, too, was largely fruitless for the same reasons. Also, I couldn’t recall a single movie we own taking place (in whole or part) during New Year’s Eve.
Our final plan was to rent something from iTunes. We enacted this same plan over Christmas at the Gregg household. There we purchased “Four Christmases”, which took about sixty minutes to download (and produced about three minutes of laughter). Tonight we’ve purchased “9”, which took about twelve minutes to download. Thank you, MidcoNet high-speed broadband internet.
So far I’m enjoying “9”. Check it out. As Holli put it, it’s kinda fitting that we’re watching “9” on the last day of 2009. That’s totally what we meant to do, yo.
Dumb post.
UPDATE: After discovering that Hulu’s ball drop was truly a livestream (and not being re-broadcast for Central Time), we rung in the new year with a fireworks display in the city of Funchal in Madeira, Portugal. Thank you, Ustream. The action starts about 3:00 into it.
Christmas Card – 2008
Ring in the new year at MilesRauschFamily.com.
Turn up your volume, and turn down your expectations.
Thus Spake Father Winter
It is cold out.
The cheerless chill that has descended upon us is one I connect to the maroon-shaded gaze of Lord Voldermort. It’s a cold that I’ve associated with the oft-written “chilled me to the bones”. For what has been a relatively mild winter, recent weeks have yielded a fresh bought of low temperatures and high snowfall.
Our travels last Christmas from Big Stone City, SD, to Sioux Falls, SD, had been a harrowing misadventure, during which we witnessed a handful of stranded vehicles, many of which my father took the time to rescue. Mostly, though, it was 10 mph “white knuckle” driving though terrible roads, low visibility, and general fatigue.
This year, we thought we were free of such a torment. Instead, once we were outside of Milbank, the blowing snow hit. I had, hitherto, never considered “blowing snow” to be anything close to dangerous. ‘What harm is there,’ I thought, ‘when you can drive right through it?’ Then we hit enough blowing snow to create white-out-like conditions, and I knew the harm. It was like driving through cloud. Tiny, island patches of road would open up (and close) before us, offering hope and despair. Our only real guidance came in the form of the reflective road posts and occassional road signs. We did eventually make our way safely but not before a couple of tense moments.
This Christmas has been a little sad. It’s been our first time seeing a lot of these people since our news, and that reminds us of our news, which makes us sad. Plus, it’s a generally happy time, which makes one think of puppy dogs, candycanes, and babies, which makes us sad. And, by terrible coincidence, the movie we saw for Christmas day, Marley and Me, features a scene in which the couple discovers that they’ve been experiencing an Anembryonic pregnancy, which made us sad. But that’s how it is. It all just makes me all the more eager to be able to try again, which will hopefully be soon. I’ll be sure to video-blog our progress.
BUT, this holiday season is not meant to be sad. It’s meant to be a joyous time. So, to share the happiness, a happiness that Holli and I have been enjoying these past weeks, I present to you the pilot episode of the anime Bleach.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Concerning Christmas
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The Miles Rausch family, of Sioux Falls, SD, would like to make the following announcement: don’t get us anything for Christmas™. They do not request this out of hatred or ill-will of their Internet fan-base, friends, or family. They would like to stress how much they love their Internet fan-base, friends, and family. This comes, rather, as a further indicator of the troubling financial and economic times that we live in. Christmas™, the couple adds, isn’t about presents so put the wallet down already.
They would also like to announce, at this time, that they will be drastically scaling back their own gift-giving. The family estimates that more that three hundred presents will lose their jobs to keep the family in the black. Sources close to the couple say that they are limiting present bestowals to siblings, parents, and possibly grandparents.
Wife, Holli Rausch, added, “These announcements were hard for us to make. One thing we haven’t considered is just how overwhelmingly awkward every day of the rest of our lives is going to be now. But we’ll just have to live with that or get new friends.”
To stem the backlash from the announcement, the Miles Rausch family has begun a Christmas™ letter which could be ready for online distribution as early as March of next year.
2008 Unofficial Election Results
General Election (National)
President: Barak Obama (306)
Vice President: Joseph Biden
General Election (South Dakota)
United States Senator: Tim Johnson (62.55%)
United States Representative: Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (67.84%)
Public Utilities Commissioner: Gary Hanson (65.89%)
District 04
State Senator: Jim Peterson (100%)
State Representatives: Val Rausch (39.65%) ; Steve Street (36.98%)
District 09
State Senator: Tom Dempster (52.01%)
State Representatives: Deb Peters (30.25%) ; Richard A. Engels (29.04%)