Recently in Personal Category

The weekend actually worked out fairly perfectly, all things considered. On Friday night, we had tickets to go to "Boo at the Zoo": trick-or-treating at the National Zoo. It was already pretty crowded by the time we got there, but the lines weren't all that long. Thankfully, there were a few monkeys awake for Evan to see (read: freak out about). And while the pandas were asleep, they are cute when asleep. Plus, we got a lot of candy. I don't think we need to go around to the neighborhood at this point.
It rained pretty much all day Saturday, which was okay because we had indoor activities planned for the most part. Unfortunately, Ellie also had to go to the doctor, but she seems to be perfectly fine now. It was her friend Claire's birthday party that day, so she had some fun playing there, and then we were off to the "Air and Scare" at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum. Not as fun as the zoo, but way more crowded due to it being free (aside from parking). We were lucky to get there early, because by the time we left a little before 6pm, the line to get into the place was insanely long, almost 2 miles backed up onto the road to get in. And there was nowhere to park once you got in either. So lucky us for getting there early. After that, since it was still pouring rain, it seemed like a good night to head to an Irish pub for dinner. I had fish and chips and a Guinness, and they were good enough to put the MSU-UM game on the TV for me, so I got to see the fourth quarter and MSU close out a big win. Loved the look on Rich Rodriguez's face every time the Wolverines made another stupid play. Thankfully, the idiot replay official's call on the first U-M touchdown didn't cost us either.
Finally, yesterday was a beautiful fall day for another birthday party, which wrapped up just in time for us to head home and catch the Giants beat the Steelers. I was so worried that the Giants would dominate every statistic and yet find a way to lose thanks to two big plays by the Steelers, but they managed to do just enough to pull out the victory. It was a big win, as they are about to head into an absolutely brutal stretch of games to end the season.
This should be another busy week for us. The Town of Vienna's Halloween parade is on Wednesday, Halloween itself is on Friday. And curling starts on Sunday! Oh, and Guitar Hero is scheduled for delivery on Tuesday. Aw yeah.

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I called Verizon to try to reduce my monthly bill for FIOS by committing to an additional year of service. Naturally, they screwed it up. The next day I found I was being charged for online storage and a security suite I never ordered. Then the following week I got a new wireless router from them in the mail, even though it was the exact model I already have! Still, the packing slip said there was no charge, but I made sure to check my bill when I got it. Oh, did I mention that since I only have internet, no home phone, they cannot send me a paper bill, and they have to bill my credit card automatically? Yeah, nice, huh? So naturally I check yesterday for this month's bill, and it comes to a whopping $194.99!!! You guessed it, they charged me $139.99 plus tax for that router they sent me. The best part was that no one in their billing department could even see the bill that I myself could see, and that I could see was being charged to my bill paying account.
After wasting much of my day on hold with no results, I resorted to the Consumerist playbook: the executive email carpet bomb. I found a list of email addresses of Verizon executives, typed up a quick email describing my plight, and sent it away at 3pm yesterday. At 4:45pm, I had an email and voice mails on my home and work phones from Mrs. Brown, who had taken care of everything for me: the router would be removed from my bill, and my FIOS would now cost me $42.99/month. Best of all, I have her direct line in case anything goes wrong again. The only bad thing is that I still cannot get a paper bill and have to auto-pay via credit card.
The whole experience definitely makes me wary of considering them for any bundling of TV, phone and Internet, but I was lucky to get through to the right person who could actually do something about my problem.
Now, if only they could help me with the pennies that Evan managed to shove into my car's CD player, causing it to short out....

This Saturday we headed downtown for the National Book Festival. We hoped to see such famous authors as Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Tiki Barber, and more. As it turned out, we very nearly walked into a couple of them.
We drove downtown and arrived well before we wanted to arrive, but had to circle for 30 minutes to find a parking spot. It turned out that, thanks to Bike DC, it would have been a great day to ride our bike downtown, or take Metro. Closed streets and construction everywhere, ugh.
After we finally got to the festival, we were dismayed at the huge line. Turns out that Laura Bush was still there signing books, and the line was to get through security. Thanks to that brilliantly idiotic move, we missed out on seeing Jan Brett, who wrote The Mitten and other fun kids' books. Instead we walked around for a little bit before making our way, after they took down the security line, back to the children's tent. On the way there a golf cart pulled up next to us, and I nearly walked smack into Neil Gaiman (author of my favorite Sandman comic books and American Gods, among others) who was speaking at the Teen tent. We got to the children's tent and saw the newest member of the New York Knicks, Chris Duhon, who was there as part of some NBA literacy program (not as an author).
I left Lisa and the kids to wait for David Shannon (author of "No, David" and others) and Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin (authors of "Click, Clack, Moo" and others) and went to check out the signing area. I was hoping that since we had missed Jan Brett's talk, we'd at least be able to get the book signed. Turned out there was no chance in hell of that happening. I got in line ten minutes before she started signing, and the line was already 400 people long. She signed for an hour and a half and there were still 300 people in line for when she would start signing again an hour and a half after that. No way. Instead, I ran back and grabbed our David Shannon books and got in line for his signing an hour away from starting. I was only about 20 people back for him. He started signing just as Lisa and the kids arrived, and I sent Lisa over to the Cronin/Lewin line. Ellie ended up bonding with David Shannon as fellow lefties. Lisa reported that she had nearly run over Salman Rushdie with the stroller!
At this point, it was well past lunchtime, so I left Lisa in line to get the Cronin/Lewis signatures and took the kids for lunch, but not before snagging a picture of Tiki Barber. Lisa got the signatures just as we finished up lunch, and we decided to head home.
We may not have gotten every signed book we wanted, but overall it was a fun time, and we managed to avoid the rain too. Next year though, we're leaning toward just going up to Baltimore for their book festival. They may not get the celebrity authors, but it's much less crowded and more laid back than the craziness of this one.

No case of the Mondays for me, I'm getting stuff done. After shopping for new car insurance and saving a whole lot of money, our homeowners insurance came up for renewal recently, so I figured I would check that out as well. Turns out we're going to save a lot of money there too. Like $385 for the year. Very nice.
A couple of days ago, I managed to do something stupid and get a trojan on our home computer. Stupid me, ended up being able to use Windows Restore to get back to before the problem and eradicated it with a long-overdue full virus scan (disclosure: the virus scan picked up the trojan before it infected the PC, but I stupidly ignored the warning and let it go). Alas, the computer started scaring me even after this problem by freezing up a couple of times, leading me to check out some backup possibilities. I looked into a few of the online backup services like Mozy and Carbonite, and also Amazon S3. All seemed reasonable, and I really liked Amazon's offering. Then I decided to check out my web host's latest offer, and found that they've upped their storage to 375GB! That's more than enough to protect my precious pictures and music. After a couple of emails back and forth, my plan is now upgraded, and I'm going to start backing up tonight hopefully.
I heard through the grapevine that the latest FIOS promotion is a free DVR for a year, which includes their Home Media DVR, which plays shows it recorded on any TV in your house. That's kinda what I have now with DirecTV, and part of the reason I haven't switched. Breaking it down, our current cost with DirecTV, FIOS internet and VOIP runs us $137.18/month. Depending on how the taxes for FIOS break down, doing their triple play would cost about $130/month, and would include HD service, should we ever break down and get an HDTV. If nothing else, I think a call to DirecTV retention is in order, simply because their current offer to new customers is a lot less than I'm paying now! Update: A quick email to DirecTV got me $10 off per month for the next year. Not too shabby. Update 2: 5 minute phone call to Verizon upped my speed to 10/2, got me $5 off for the next year. 7 minutes of work for $15/month, or $180 for the year.
One last thing: this morning I started week 6 of the 100 pushup challenge again. I'm getting close now though. I managed to do 80 pushups on Saturday before collapsing in a heap. Pretty damn good after starting out doing only 25 when I started at the end of June.

This weekend was Ellie's big 5th birthday party. Lisa's family was in from Michigan to help celebrate, so we took everyone to the new Nationals Park for a baseball game. I had been hoping to get the $5 tickets (only available gameday), but was shocked when there was a long line for tickets, and more shocked when the cheapest tickets left were the $20 seats. Still, they were pretty darn good seats, all things considered. You could see the Capitol from where we sat, and there was only one corner of left field that you couldn't see. Unfortunately, the kids only lasted through the sixth inning, so we missed the excitement of the extra innings win, but we had a good time regardless.
Ellie's party went amazingly well. All the kids were scattered around the craft table to start, decorating their flip-flops. Our snow-cone machine was a hit, as usual. Our homemade pinata actually lasted a decent amount of time, and it took three of the older boys to bust it open. And of course, Lisa's sandcastle cake was amazing, as usual. Even with all the craziness, I had a really good time this weekend, and was nowhere near as stressed as usual. I guess we're all getting better the older and wiser we get.

Just back from visiting my mom and brother. Much more to come, but I had to share this story from our flight out.
We were scheduled to leave early in the morning on Wednesday, so we drove up to Baltimore on Tuesday night and stayed in a hotel which conveniently allowed us to leave our minivan there while we were gone. We got to the airport in plenty of time, and went through security and arrived at our gate very early. We had a perfect view of the puddle on the ground under the wing which the mechanic was staring at, then staring up at the wing. So it was inevitable that, after consulting with other mechanics, they came over the loudspeaker and said we would be delayed for a full inspection. If we left at 9am after the inspection, we might make our connection in Minneapolis. But 9am rolled around, and I could see the mechanic had not put the screws back in the wing, and we were not making that connection, so I got in line to rebook. At that time, there were about 4 people ahead of us and 2 people working at the counter.
While chasing Ellie and Evan around the terminal and Lisa still waiting in line, I noticed that the Northwest flight to Detroit had just left from the gate next to ours, and there was no one there any more. Except one woman who was closing down the counter at the gate. I walked up to her holding Evan in my arms and asked nicely if we could rebook through her, since we were obviously going to miss our connection. She happily said she could, and I called Lisa over. Our helpful Northwest worker then told us we could go through Detroit and arrive at about 4:30, or she could try to get us on a Midwest Airlines flight through Milwaukee arriving at 3pm. We were well aware that Midwest has free fresh baked cookies, so we jumped all over that flight. She called over to Midwest to confirm they had space, and we were rebooked. Somewhere during this time, the gate agent for our original flight came on and confirmed the bad news: they had to fly a new part for our plane in from Minneapolis. That flight wouldn't arrive till 1pm, and they might leave at 4pm for Minneapolis, and I'm sure there was no way we would have gotten onto a flight from there to KC. When we left, the line for the counter was at least 50 people long, and there was no one waiting at our gate agent's counter.
I'm probably never going to make it on the Amazing Race (it'll get canceled before the kids are old enough for us to leave them for an around-the-world race), but for a brief moment, I felt like I had just finagled our way into winning the race. Our trip could have started out just miserably, but with a little forethought and good fortune in finding a helpful gate agent, we got onto our Midwest Airlines flight with no problem, enjoyed our chocolate chip cookies (on BOTH legs), and made it to KC only a little later than we had planned. We win!

I finally got around to uploading my GPS watch data, which included my hike up Old Rag while the rest of the family was out of town. Check out the elevation chart! Fun stuff.

We actually now have a Subway in our building, and they also participate in the $5 footlong subs (of which they recently expanded to 8 subs). You can choose from Meatball Marinara, Cold Cut Combo, Spicy Italian, Veggie Delite®, Black Forest Ham, Oven Roasted Chicken Breast, a BLT (bacon, lettuce, tomato), and Tuna. I decided to do some lunch math to challenge the whole "brown bagging is cheaper" paradigm. So, here we go.
I purchase a $5 footlong every other day, saving 6 inches for the following day. Ignore the fact that a meatball sub is going to be soggy and play along. Total cost for 5 day work week: $12.50. And I can load it up with lettuce, tomato, onion, etc. My favorite is to get the chicken sub, and put the sweet onion sauce on. Voila! Instant cheapo Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sub (normally around $6).
Grocery store: Primo Taglio Oven Roasted Turkey Vacuum Pack - 8 Oz - $4.99
Kraft Cracker Barrel Natural Cheese Sharp Cheddar Slices - 7 Oz - $4.99
Arnold 12 Grain Bread - 24 Oz - $3.99
Total: $13.97, and I have no condiments or lettuce or anything on top. I also usually only get 4 days worth of lunch from this combination, 2 ounces of turkey a day. In fairness, if I wasn't lazy and went up to the deli counter to buy my turkey, it'd be about a dollar cheaper, and the cheese would be about a dollar cheaper too. Yet that only brings us down to $11.97, or a $0.53 difference, not including condiments, etc. However, since that's not what I do, I only present it here as an exercise.
The catch, obviously, is that you have to stick to the $5 menu (and avoid the delicious cookies!), which ironically does not include turkey. Still, I think there is enough variety in there to not have to worry about it, especially since I've been eating turkey since I can remember. The other catch is that I am lucky enough to have the Subway in my building, so it doesn't cost me anything to walk over there, whereas others who have to drive (or ride their bikes!) to Subway every other day have additional time and gas costs to consider. The other consideration is chips, which I believe are still cheaper to buy at the store rather than buying by individual bags at Subway, whether through the combo or not.
I have a short week next week, since we will be going on vacation on Wednesday, so as an experiment, I'm going to get Subway rather than brown bagging it.

On Tuesday night, my wife and I went out for dinner, by ourselves, no kids, for the first time in a long time. I decided to take the advice of Tommy Wells, DC Councilman from Ward 6, who I met at the Zipcar Low-Car Diet kickoff event. He mentioned that he used Zipcar for a lot of things, including going out on the town to places where Metro might not go. The best part, he said, was picking which of the many fun Zipcars he wanted to drive that night. Having made the decision to do a Zipcar Date Night, I had to decide: the Mini Cooper or the BMW 3 series? I ended up picking the Mini, because I had heard it was a lot of fun to drive.
I took the bus from work down to Ballston, where I picked up the Mini "Manchester." From there, it was a quick trip home to pick up my wife, and we were off to Et Voila, a Belgian restaurant in Palisades NW.

My daughter loves to play "Spot the Mini" on the road, she couldn't believe we had one in our driveway!

My wife getting ready to hop in.

The Zipcar Mini did not disappoint. A word of warning though, the layout of the controls and the dashboard is not like your other cars. Give yourself a little extra time to familiarize yourself with it, otherwise, you may think that those paddles by the steering wheel are the horn, instead of manual gear shifters like they really are. The Mini was surprisingly roomy and definitely fun to drive. And parking was no problem at all, even on the crowded streets of DC.
Our dinner was wonderful, from the ham-wrapped endives to the steak and mussels, to the chocolate mousse dessert (and don't forget the wide array of Belgian beers, but go easy since you have to drive the Zipcar home!). We took our time and lingered until it was time for "Manchester" to go home to Ballston. Our date was a great success, and the Mini was definitely one of the highlights. After all, who really wants to go on a date in a minivan?!?!

First, an update on the 100 pushup challenge. I managed to struggle my way through week 4, and I'm moving on to Week 5. However, I did my max pushup test (39, even though I might have managed to squeeze out one or two more) last night, so I won't actually start week 5 till tomorrow. Also, I have attained "bronze" level on the President's challenge. Not too shabby.
Tomorrow is going to be a big night. Our neighbor is coming over to babysit the kids, and Lisa and I will be going out to dinner. A real sit down dinner, with reservations and everything! As part of the fun, I'm going to go pick up a Zipcar to use for the evening. I mean, who wants to go out on a date in a minivan? So I'm going to go pick up the Mini Cooper and we'll scoot around town in that for the night. We're heading to Et Voila, a Belgian restaurant. I'm excited to try their mussels, and Lisa will have plenty of desserts to choose from.
On Friday afternoon, I took a couple of pictures on my commute home. Now remember that these were taken before 4pm, theoretically before "rush hour."

The Beltway, getting stacked up already.

The W&OD Trail, no traffic here.

The sun is starting to come up later now though, so soon enough, I'm going to have to either start delaying getting to work, or get a stronger headlight for the darkness. No thanks to Congress moving daylight savings to November!

I managed to recover from Thursday's stomach bug enough to ride my bike in to work again today. If I hadn't been able to, I'd have had to ride the bus. Not a big deal, just requires more planning. Plus, I like riding the bike better. Thankfully, after Thursday's difficulties, I was able to slowly work my way back to health on Friday, and on Saturday and Sunday I was well enough to eat just about anything, including gumbo yesterday, made with our first batch of okra from the CSA. Yummy. Unfortunately, week 4 of the pushup challenge got sidetracked, so I am redoing week 4 starting today. It's not any easier than it was last week, believe me.
Not much else to say at the moment, so I might as well get to work.

The wife and kids were out of town this weekend, and I had a lot to do even with them gone. I managed to get a bunch of stuff done around the house, including painting the bathroom and putting up the last of the upstairs doors (to the kids' room). Thankfully no one was home for the latter, as I was cursing up a storm getting the thing up.
I also cleaned up the workshop, which had become a dumping ground for all the old doors and wood scraps we've accumulated over the past couple of years. All the stuff is now out on the curb awaiting pickup.
I also did some fun stuff. On Saturday morning, I went to see The Dark Knight (it was sold out, even for the 10am showing!). Good flick, Ledger stole it of course, but if they had just put in one or two more scenes detailing why Harvey Dent went to the dark side, it could have been brilliant altogether. I also went to watch my cousin play Gaelic football on Saturday, only to watch him bust his thumb and chip his tooth. He very dramatically spit the piece of tooth out, completely grossing out the fans in attendance. I haven't heard yet whether he broke it, but hopefully he's okay. Finally, yesterday I took a trip up to Shenandoah and hiked Old Rag mountain. It's probably my favorite hike, but totally unrealistic with kids, since there's a lot of spots where you have to scramble over large rocks, and it's just not a good idea. But great fun for me on my own! I always love getting there early and spending some quality alone time at the top of the mountain with no signs of people around at all. Except for that granola bar wrapper. Fuckers. Even more fun is coming down and seeing the overeager overweight people who haven't even gotten to the rocks yet, almost finished with the single bottle of water, huffing and puffing their way up. On the drive back home, I stopped by the Epicurious Cow for lunch, and had a fine shrimp po' boy sandwich.
And the rest of Sunday I sat on my butt and caught up on Tivo. As it was intended.

Week 3 of the One Hundred Pushup Challenge was a killer. I tested into the "> 25 pushups" portion after doing 30 on Sunday, and immediately on the first day, I had to start with 25 pushups for just the first set! It doesn't get easier, as you have 60 seconds to recover and move on to 17, 17, 15, then 25 to finish up. My form was... not good. But I pretty much finished it. Eventually on Day 3, this morning, I had to do 30, 22, 22, 20 and 27. I barely eked my way through that, leading me to consider redoing the week. However, after looking ahead to week 4, I realized it wouldn't be that much more than I did this week, so I will forge ahead and see how I do.
On the President's Challenge side, I'm now 86 % of the way toward the goal of 20000 points for a Bronze Award. I should be able to surpass 20000 by the end of next week.
On Monday morning, I'll be headed downtown for the Zipcar Low-Car Diet kickoff. If anyone happens to be near Gallery Place around 9am, stop by and say hi. The requirements are pretty simple: don't use your car for a month, and see how it goes. I have to send them email updates every couple of weeks, and I might record a video of my commute or our trips to the market or something. In return, I got a free Zipcar membership for the year, $150 driving credit for Zipcars, $250 MetroCard for riding the train or bus, a copy of How to Live Well Without Owning a Car (which I already read and own a copy of) and a free one year membership to the Washington Area Bicyclists Association. Not a bad haul, I must say. That MetroCard should definitely help on those bad weather days. Who knows? Maybe I can eventually sell our second car.

I completed Week 2 of the One Hundred Pushup Challenge this morning. So far it hasn't been too terribly difficult. Sometime this weekend, I will do another test to exhaustion, to see which column I have to do for weeks 3 and 4. I'm pretty sure I'll be in column 3 (the hardest) again, since I should be able to do more than 25 easily. One thing I do need to add is situps in the off-days, to make sure I stay well-rounded.
In the President's Challenge, I have 13413 "points," meaning I am roughly 2/3 of the way to a "Bronze Award." Not too bad after only a month of recording the data. I started getting points more quickly now that my biking speed has gotten faster, and I'm no longer in the "Moderate, 12 - 16 mph" but in the "Vigorous, faster than 16 mph" category. It's a big difference too, I have found that I can stay in the big gears going up hills for much longer. I am still definitely winded once I get to the top, but I'm getting there much quicker, which makes me feel good. And this morning, I raced the bus and won for the first time. We were both at the same stoplight, and when it turns green, the bus takes a short detour to pick up a couple of passengers while I go straight. The bus usually catches me before I get to the end of the mile long stretch, but this morning, I beat it by a good 30 seconds or so. A good way to start the morning.

I bagged out of work early on Thursday afternoon so that we would go up to Hartland Orchard for some blueberry picking. We ended up with 12 pints of blueberries for $20, less than $1.67 per pint. They were on sale at the farmers market for $4.50/pint on Saturday. A good deal, even accounting for gas costs. Of course, now we have 12 pints of blueberries to eat. We gave away 3 pints to friends and neighbors, and Lisa made blueberry buckle for breakfast. That leaves a lot of blueberries left, though Evan has figured out that he can reach up on the table and grab handfuls at a time to snack on.
We biked up to the park on Friday for the Independence Day festivities. Shockingly, the "all-you-can-ride" bracelet was priced at a reasonable $10, so Ellie got to have all the fun she could handle on the various moon bounces and slides. It was a bit hot, but we brought plenty of water and had a lot of fun. We skipped out on the laser light show though (last year's fireworks went horribly wrong, shooting into spectators and badly injuring at least one woman) since it was starting to rain. Instead, we picked up Baskin-Robbins where Ellie had the very patriotic Nation's Birthday ice cream.
On Saturday, we headed down the street to our neighbor's second birthday party. They had a moon bounce there too, so Ellie was in heaven. Burgers, popsicles, cake, fun times had by all.
Finally, on Sunday we headed downtown for the last day of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Featured this year were Texas (skipped it, except for the BBQ), NASA (50th anniversary), and Bhutan. Learning about Bhutan, a small country wedged between Nepal, India and China, was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the various alcoholic drinks they make all from the same fermented mash, the most popular of which is called ara. Unfortunately, the rules didn't allow us regular folks to sample the drink, so we'll just have to plan a trip to Bhutan sometime. Maybe then I could actually try some real "ema datshi," which they served in a watered-down, barely spicy version at the vending stands. We could also try the equally fascinating butter tea, suja. At any rate, the kids had a good time, especially at the NASA area.
So now I'm back at work after riding in this morning (73 degrees can be surprisingly oppressive when combined with 84% humidity), wishing I just had one more day for the long weekend.

John got it right after a few guesses, and my brother got it right on his first guess: homemade yogurt! We bought milk at the farmers market on Saturday specifically for this purpose. It was pretty simple really, you heat the milk without scalding it, throw in some store bought yogurt, then put the jar in the warm car outside (110 degrees or so) for a few hours. It really does end up tasting just as good as the store bought stuff. It only saves a couple bucks, but every little bit helps, and it's fun too.
Better yet was when we were at Whole Foods picking up a few things and found local cherries on sale for $2/pound. We picked up 3 pounds, and Lisa made the best cherry pie from scratch. It was freaky how much it looked like a store bought pie, the filling looked like it was from a can, but everything she used was fresh ingredients. Just way too good to be good for my waistline.
Luckily, I've still been riding my bike, and this is the first week I've been doing the one hundred pushup challenge. I did day 2 this morning, and I'm having trouble imagining myself 5 weeks from now doing two sets of 27 pushups separated by 30 seconds of rest. But I'll keep trying and post my progress.

Round one of the President's Challenge Adult Fitness Test, I hope to do it again near the end of the summer or in September.
Gender: Male
Age: 34
1.5 mile run: 10:17
Half sit-ups in one minute: 73
Pushups: 25
Sit and reach: 18 inches (18.5, but no decimals in the test form)
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 159 lbs
Waist circumference: 32 inches

I was in the 80th percentile on the 1.5 mile run, 95th on situps, 45th on pushups, and 70th on sit and reach. That put me in the 72nd overall. My BMI was 22.8: "normal." So I was above average in 3 of the 4, not bad. I actually did the run on the local roads instead of a track, with hills and all, so I'm not sure if I could have done better there. If I had just done 2 more pushups, I would have been in the 50th percentile there too (but personally, I doubt that half of American males my age can do 10 pushups, let alone 25). I'll be using the 25 pushups as my initial test for the one hundred pushup challenge, which I'll start tomorrow.

I was off from work yesterday as we were spending the day at Shenandoah National Park. Good times were had by all. Ellie even managed to walk almost the entire 2 mile, 3 hour "scavenger hike" we went on. The most interesting part was when we saw a box turtle along the hiking path. Apparently, they are "common" in the park, though it was probably odd to see it at 3500+ feet, with no real streams or steady water nearby. Aside from the turtle, the only other wildlife we saw were a bunch of deer, which are frankly so common they're darn near nuisances at this point. No bears, plenty of squirrels and chipmunks, and possibly a vole. The best part of the trip though was arriving home and having Ellie say, "I wish we were still in the mountains." She's already planning our next trip.

Today marked the fifth straight day I rode my bike to work. That's right, a whole work week without driving. I haven't made an official total yet (I do still have to ride home tonight after all), but my total mileage for the week should be about 78 miles. And last night, I somehow managed to make every single light on the way home, finishing up my 7+ mile trek in just over 26 minutes, beating my previous best by over 2 minutes.
This week's riding included riding home in the rain on Monday after the worst of the thunderstorms rolled through, once again knocking out power throughout the area. But on my bike, I could easily zip through the clogged intersections with their dark signal lights while the cars couldn't do anything but honk their horns. The only obstacle was a tree down across the biking trail at one spot, but that wasn't much trouble. On Tuesday, I once again took a 3 mile detour to pick up our farm share, which is working out well. The rest of the week riding was fairly ordinary, with beautifully cool weather all week long, as opposed to the oppressive 95+ degree heat last week.
So while I continue to ride my bike the rest of the summer (at least), I've decided to take on two more challenges. First is the "One Hundred Pushup Challenge." It's a six week plan to work your way up to doing 100 consecutive pushups. I figure I should work on my upper body strength in addition to biking for the lower body. Sometime this weekend, I'll do the initial test (do as many pushups as possible to exhaustion), and I'll start doing the 3 days per week training to build up my strength.
Second is the President's Adult Fitness Challenge. This is similar to what we did as kids. There are four tests: aerobic fitness (1.5 mile run), muscular strength and endurance (situps and pushups), flexibility (sit and reach) and body composition (BMI and waist circumference). I'm going to try to do these tests sometime in the next couple of weeks, and then again near the end of the summer or possibly into September. I'm also going to register and log my daily activities to earn "points" for Presidential awards. Since they allow you to enter data back 14 days, I'm already 26% of the way to my first award!
Those are the challenges I'm taking on this summer. What are YOU doing with your summer?

Holy crap it's hot around here. We tied a record on Saturday (which was set in 1999, when we were conveniently in Italy on our honeymoon) and had a heat index of 103 yesterday. So naturally, we spent a lot of the weekend outside.
On Saturday morning, we got up bright and early to head out to the Arlington & Alexandria Community Bike Ride. The ride thankfully started at 8:30am, and was only 6.4 miles (we were on the "family" ride, the full ride was 23 miles and went through Arlington on bike lanes, which we weren't quite p for). Of course, it was so humid out, there was a thick fog that didn't really burn off until we had finished the ride around 10am. The kids did fairly well, except for the one bit where Evan's helmet slipped forward and he couldn't see anything. He was sweating like crazy by the end though. Ellie was great, helping Evan with his water bottle and food. Lisa managed to pull her old Huffy all the way through, even up the last super steep hill. And we all loved the water mister tent at the end.
After the ride we picked up Ellie's friend Claire, and hopped in the baby pool for a bit to cool off until heading downtown to Georgetown. We hit Five Guys for dinner, and Ellie actually finished her whole burger (minus the piece she donated to Evan). Then we walked over to Holy Trinity Church to watch our neighbors perform in an Irish dance recital. Ellie LOVED the whole thing, so we may be stuck spending a lot of money to sign her up for those classes. It was quite the range of talent at the recital. There were kids who had qualified for national and world championships, down to the kids who were brand new, but still better than me, where half the class was going one direction, and the other half the opposite, resulting in comical crashes. Like I said, Ellie loved the whole thing, and we stayed to the end, at 9pm. We narrowly avoided getting caught in a heat-generated thunderstorm, which had quite the impressive lightning show.
The next morning, we got up early again, this time to head down to the zoo for a meerkat class. Ellie and Claire learned about meerkat guards, how to dig with their eyes closed, and other fun stuff. Thankfully, I had parked at the bottom of the hill that the zoo is built on, so we slowly made our way down after having some lunch from On The Fly, hitting every water mister along the way. Evan finally crashed near the lions and tigers, so I took him into one of the restaurants to cool off and nap.
After we got home and Claire's parents picked her up, we were lucky enough to get invited to the neighborhood pool (we don't yet have a membership, so we must beg to get invited as guests). Evan was a little freaked out by the big pool, maybe there were too many people or something. But he eventually warmed up to it when I started playing with him. And he really liked the baby pool. Ellie of course had a great time, but she is still scared of putting her head underwater, and she really has no idea what she's doing when I tell her to kick and try to swim. Still, the pool was extremely useful for cooling off after a hot weekend. Now, if we could just get that membership.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post devoted nearly their entire Food section to pizza. Frozen pizza taste tests, carryout recommendations (Church Street NY-style for the win!), and so on (pizza flavored beer?). But I was most intrigued by the article on grilling pizza. It was the second article on grilling pizza I had read in a week, so I had to give it a try.
Last night, we invited our neighbor over for a sanity-saving dinner (her husband is out of town, so she's going bonkers with two kids all to herself). We had grilled pizza and leftover mojitos from our BBQ Monday. Lisa made the dough in advance, giving it plenty of time to rise and such. While she was off at the chiropractor, I got the toppings ready, grilling some asparagus, slicing some fresh mozzarella, and mincing garlic. Then it was time to test it out.
Despite my worries about the dough falling through the grill slats, it actually worked almost as advertised. I got better about holding the dough at "10 and 2" as I cooked more pizzas (five total), but the first couple of pizzas were more rectangular than round. Luckily the kids and parents didn't care about style points, more about taste. The crust was nicely crisp, and the pizza was delicious. We had one pepperoni, two margherita, and two asparagus, prosciutto and fresh mozz (one had garlic too).
If you're looking for a way to liven up your boring steak/burger/chicken grilling routine, definitely click some of the links above to find out more. It's a fun experience for the whole family. Just don't let the kids get too close to the grill!

I got a little bit worried last week when I started totaling up the RSVPs for our barbecue and found we were going to get upwards of 40 people attending. That's a lot of people to feed! Luckily, our local Whole Foods was having a sale where they gave you $10 off your $40 meat purchase. We stocked up on a bunch of sausages: chicken spinach feta, chicken apple, hot italian turkey, veal bratwurst and pork bratwurst. And of course the obligatory hot dogs for the kids. We also got a whole bunch of corn (12 ears for $2, what price increase?). Our guests brought a bunch of side dishes to help us out. We also provided Grandma Kazmer's sweet tea, mojitos, strawberry margaritas, Bell's Oberon Ale, and juice boxes to drink.
Everything went very well. I was able to handle the grilling duties and all the sausages came out great. I personally thought the mojitos were great as well as the beer. I probably enjoyed those a little too much.
The kids had a good time with the kiddie pool (at least two naked kids spotted in there) and sprinkler, and they loved when we brought out a nifty new ice shaver for snow cones. It was a great way to kick off the summer season.

After a few false starts, I managed to ride my bike in to work today. Well, sort of. It's kind of cheating because I only rode my bike in from the dealership, where I dropped my car off to have some work done, and the dealership is only about 3 miles from where I work, as opposed to the 7-8 miles I'd normally ride from home. But still, I rode in, well in advance of Ride Your Bike To Work Day (May 16) and National Bike Month (May).
Last night, I stopped at the bike shop on my way home to pick up some vital equipment, including lights, rain gear (which so far turned out to be unnecessary) and a rack to put my panniers on. The first rack didn't fit on my bike, because my bike conveniently is missing the "braze-on" mount points where it's supposed to screw on. (Also, the package for the rack was missing about 8 screws, making it really hard to install.) Fabulous. So instead I had to take it back and get a rack that mounted on the seat post. Not my favorite solution, but it at least works.
After I got all the stuff home, I put everything on the bike and was ready to go. Luckily, I had planned ahead and brought my work clothes in yesterday so that I wouldn't have to bring them in on my bike today. I found that the panniers may be a tad small for bringing everything in, and I may need a trunk after all, or at least somewhere to put my lunch. We'll see how everything fits on the way home first, and try a few more real commutes with them. They also were a bit tricky to get situated on the bike. There's only one bungie cord strap holding it on, and it could definitely benefit with some added stability.
Otherwise, the ride was good. The weather cleared up a whole lot from yesterday, and my rain jacket ended up keeping me warm rather than dry. The route in from the dealer wasn't too hairy, aside from a brief stint of no shoulder coming across the Beltway bridge. That should be interesting to tackle going up the hill on the way back, rather than the speedy descent on the way in. I'm looking forward to riding a lot more this summer, now that I'll be better equipped!

Yesterday, we took a trip up to South Mountain Creamery to see where our milk for this summer will be coming from. Lisa and Ellie had been there before, but this was my first trip there. They were having a big open house event, and the overcast weather didn't dampen their spirits much. We had fun riding in the tractor around the farm (pretty much a view of grass, since they're grass-fed cows), seeing the baby cows, baby goats, baby chicks, baby ducks, and baby bunnies! Lots of babies. They had some good barbecue for lunch too, and plenty of dairy products. We left with 2 dozen eggs, a bunch of asparagus, and our first half-gallon of milk. We took the eggs and made a frittata with some leftover ham from Easter, some good gruyere cheese, and the asparagus. Lisa has made it before, but this one seemed to taste a lot better. Even the picky eater Ellie ate all of hers. I guess that's what happens when you use good ingredients. Thankfully, the farmers market starts this week, so we'll be getting better ingredients more frequently. Plus, our CSA starts two weeks from tomorrow, and we'll have way more fresh ingredients than we'll know what to do with.

I've been on a bit of a health kick lately. We signed up for our community-supported agriculture share so that we can get decent produce when it's actually in season, instead of year-round at the grocery store, shipped in fresh from the other side of the world. I got my bike out of storage and will be riding in to work again soon. I got new running shoes and will start running whenever I can drag my lazy butt out of bed. Here's what I've been doing even more recently.
I've been drinking water for over a year now, since I stopped buying soda. It was money I didn't need to spend, plus it's crappy to drink that stuff every day. I've been drinking water from the water fountain in my Nalgene bottle, but now the National Toxicology Program is coming out with a report saying that BPA is pretty much omnipresent in our bloodstreams, thanks at least in part to leaching from plastics, like the one used in my Nalgene bottle. So we're ordering Sigg water bottles for the family to replace our plastic sippy cups and water bottles. If you're concerned, try to avoid plastics labeled #3, 6, and sometimes 7.
I also recently realized that my favorite fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt is pretty much loaded with that evil substance high fructose corn syrup. On our last trip to the grocery store, I bought a tub of plain yogurt and fresh fruit to mix in with it. The yogurt with just fruit is probably an acquired taste, since the sweet flavor doesn't mix through the yogurt like it does with my old favorite. Still, it wasn't bad. I also tried mixing some low sugar strawberry preserves in with the yogurt, which made the overall taste more palatable, but pretty much tasted like yogurt mixed with jelly. I'll prefer fresh fruit, but I'm okay with using the preserves in a pinch.
We do still have our vices (Chinese food last night that is way too bad for us, McDonald's milkshakes), but we're trying to do better. The world doesn't change overnight, after all.

With curling season finally over, it's time to turn my attention to fairer weather activities, like running and biking. This weekend, I took my bike out for a test spin, and shockingly found everything still fairly well tuned. I'll probably start riding to work in the next couple of weeks.
I went to a real running shoe store on Sunday to get fitted for new shoes. Here's what I posted about the store on Yelp.com:

After years of picking my running shoes by looking for a $60-80 shoe, trying it out, and figuring it was fine, I decided it was time to get truly fitted for new shoes this time. My body is getting creakier with the years, and those little injuries start adding up, so I needed to make sure it wasn't my equipment that was doing it to me.
I was helped by Sandra, who had me roll up my jeans and take off my shoes so she could get a good look at my feet. She immediately saw I had high arches, which I had never been told before. My walking stride didn't show anything out of the ordinary, so it was time to take a look at my jogging stride. After putting a pair of Asics Cumulus on my feet, I ran down the sidewalk away from her, then back. She noticed a slight roll in my left foot, and we went back inside to try out some shoes.
Since I am only going to be running 5-10k at the most, she recommended a shoe with just a little bit of support to keep me from rolling when I get tired. The first shoe ended up being the one I liked most, as it felt the most like an extension of my foot. I left with a new pair of Saucony Progrid Guides. I was very pleased that they were only $90, and that she hadn't gotten me into a pair of $200 shoes without me realizing.
Great experience, and I could see while I was there that the other people in the store were getting the same personal attention that I was.

I'm excited to try them out on a real run soon, and I'll record my stats on my GPS watch.
We also picked up a new bookcase. After years of abuse, our crappy particleboard bookcase was listing alarmingly to one side, so we decided it was time for a new one. We had our eye on the 5 shelf Riley bookcase at World Market, but we wanted to check out our local "bare wood" furniture store first. I wasn't blown away by any of their choices, but they had a good one that we could have stained ourselves for around $300. But when we popped in to World Market, we found the one we wanted on sale for just over $200, and we had to get it. I spent the afternoon putting it together, and it's very solid, and goes well in our living room. Looks a heck of a lot nicer than the old one too.
So that's a big chunk of our economic stimulus check spent before it even gets here....

Good: Evan, after having back-to-back sleepless nights thanks to a 102 degree fever, finally got a reasonable night's sleep last night, allowing his parents to sleep a little better too.
Bad: I got paged for work at 4:30am.
Bad: My adopted daughter from the playground is moving to France in July. They had said there was a possibility of moving to Brussels in the next couple of years, but not Paris, not July! I will miss them.
Good: Guitar Hero 3, in spite of me choosing Super-saver shipping from Amazon, is being delivered today! Squee!

Spring technically arrived last week, but the weather hasn't quite warmed up enough to convince me, even though all our flowers are blooming in the front yard, and the trees are starting to bud like crazy too. So it seems strange that I will still be curling in leagues for the next couple of weeks. And let me tell you: it can't end soon enough. At this point, I'm just going through the motions of it all and looking forward to having a break. Side note: the US women are 4-1 so far at the World Championships, though they have a long way to go yet, playing the top two teams (China?!?! and Canada) later today.
MSU's hoops team pulled off a mild upset beating Pitt this week. I think a lot of people had Pitt going far, based on their streak through the Big East tourney, but thanks to some help from the refs in letting a lot of the rough play go, we were able to advance. It should be interesting to see how much rough stuff we get away with against Memphis. If they let us be physical with the Tigers, we have a good chance, I think.
The hockey team starts its title defense as the three seed out West against Colorado College on Friday. Too bad it's on ESPNU and I won't be able to watch.
Random Amazon purchasing info and lust: Ellie has been getting toward the height limit of her Britax car seat, so we've been looking for a booster seat for her. The catch is that we still want her to be in a 5-point harness, and there aren't a lot of candidates out there, though the market is growing. Ellie's cousin has the "throne," the Britax Regent, which harnesses up to 80 pounds and runs a cool $250. We also looked at the Sunshine Kids Radian and some other more expensive models ($200+) But yesterday I found out about the new model from Graco, and we drove out to Burlington Coat Factory (more than great coats, they have a sub-store in there dubbed Baby Depot). The Nautilus costs $150 and has a high height limit harness, and a 65 pound weight limit. Ellie's still under 30 pounds, so we were more worried about the height than anything, so we had her sit in it and try it out. We thought she might not like it, since it's still very "car seat"-ish, but she actually did like it. Only problem was that they were out of stock, so Amazon to the rescue. Now we just have to wait for the super-saver shipping to arrive in a couple of weeks.
Lastly, Harmonix announced that Rock Band for Wii will be coming out in June. Woot! Maybe Ellie can play drums while I play guitar!

Last night, we're cooking up some fondue, but realized we didn't have the chicken that we thought we did to have with it. What we did have was a whole ton of dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. Ellie wholeheartedly approved of Plan B, so we had bread, apples, and dino-bites with fondue.
Lisa was brave enough to dip the first nugget in, skewering it on the fork and slowly dipping it into the cheese, saying "Aaaahhh!!! La Brea tar pits!"
This is what passes for entertainment at our house these days.

Saint Patrick's Day is Monday (though if you're Catholic, the mass celebrating St. Patrick will be tomorrow, since you can't hold such celebrations during Holy Week), so here's a reminder: friends don't let friends drink green beer! A couple of recommendations: any of the Beer Madness brews (at least, the non-macros), or the recommendations in Greg Kitsock's latest column.

No Guinness on hand? You can substitute Murphy's Stout, Beamish Stout or O'Hara's Celtic Stout (the latter a roastier, more aggressive version of the style from a microbrewery in Carlow, Ireland). Anheuser-Busch's draft-only Bare Knuckle Stout is similar to Guinness in taste and strength. Ask your bartender to top off the pale, citrusy Widmer Hefeweizen with some Bare Knuckle to make a lava lamp, so named because the stout tends to bob up and down like the globules in the lamp.
If you'd prefer a sharper contrast of flavor, layer the sweeter, mochalike Milk Stout from Lancaster Brewing Co. in Pennsylvania atop the brewery's bitter Hop Hog, an India pale ale. Brewer Bill Moore calls the drink hog's milk.
Be warned: Many American microbrewery stouts are much heavier than Guinness Draught, particularly if they're prefaced by the adjective "imperial." But you can sometimes reverse the order of the layers. Try topping off a Shakespeare Stout from Rogue Ales in Newport, Ore., with that brewery's Kells Irish Lager. (An O'Shakespeare?)

I can also recommend almost any of the Bell's stouts (not the cherry though). But whatever you choose, just make sure it's not green!

Getting to feeling a bit better about things this morning. I worked myself out of the rut a little bit by indulging in the Jolly Pumpkin Oro De Calabaza on Tuesday evening, then having Chipotle for lunch yesterday instead of my usual turkey sandwich, and finally went out for ice cream with the kids last night.
This morning, I finally managed to track down a farm from which we will be buying a "community-supported agriculture" share (CSA). How it works is that you prepay for the summer's worth of fresh veggies (and sometimes fruit and eggs, depending on the farm), and every week, you get a box full of stuff. You're somewhat at the whim of the farm and what they grow, but generally speaking, it's stuff that is in season that you would normally buy at the farmers market anyway, so it's a pretty good deal. The one we signed up for costs a little bit more than some others, at $625 for the year (May through October, about 20 weeks, so $30/week or so), but they are also certified organic and they look to have some good stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing what Lisa can do with okra!
I also started looking into other fun stuff to do. I have a voucher for a free round of golf at Bristow Manor Golf Course, so I'll be looking to do that as the weather gets a little warmer. (You can see the course at GolfFlyover.com, though there's no way to link directly to it, so you have to do your own search.) We also want to plan another one-night getaway to the mountains of Shenandoah, since there is a sale on rooms at Skyland Resort going on. And with Spring Break for Ellie next week, I might have to play hooky from work for a day and go bumper bowling, as my brother suggested. Further into the future, I'm working on possible plans to go to Chicago and Detroit over the weekend that I would have been playing in the bonspiel. It's mainly a matter of whether I want to do that much driving, but it's almost certainly better than sitting home alone.

This morning, I went to submit our entry into the last bonspiel of the year, a fun get-together up in New Jersey that I've been wanting to play in for some time. We put a team together, and all I thought I had to do was get the entry in before March 15. Turns out, not so much. They already filled up their allotment of teams, so we got shut out of playing. Pretty much all I have to say about that is "Fuck!" Lisa had already booked a flight to Michigan for that weekend so that she wouldn't have to be stuck home alone with the kids all weekend, so now I have to figure out what the heck to do instead.
Needless to say, the rut just got deeper.

As happens every so often, I feel like I am stuck in a rut once again. Work is mind-numbingly boring, and I'm even looking forward to the curling season coming to an end in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure what to do to get out of the rut though. I did decide to skip baseball, at least for the spring. I'm thinking I will run some 5k races and such. We do have some other interesting things going on in the next few weeks and months ahead, including the almost all-day St. Patrick's Day party this Saturday, my grandparents' 60th anniversary party, my and Lisa's birthdays in April, a wedding in Atlanta in May. Still, it's the daily grind that is grinding me down lately.
Anyone have any suggestions for getting out of a rut?

In honor of Shane's sacrifice, our family went without red meat all this week. Honestly, it's not a huge deviation from our normal weekly menu which regularly features a vegetarian meal and a soup of the week, but it did take some effort to make sure we didn't slip.
On Saturday night, we hit up Skorpio Maggio's Restaurant for a chicken dinner. Damn good chicken, as DCist said in its review.
On Sunday, we had a late lunch at Dogfish Head Alehouse in Falls Church. I had been wanting to go there for a while, and since we were nowhere near the area, we stopped by for a turkey club (my wife), and fish and chips (me and Ellie). I also had a nice Chicory Stout, though I was mildly disappointed that they didn't have any limited/seasonal releases on tap. Guess I'll have to go back. For dinner on Sunday, we had chicken leftovers.
On Monday, I had my usual turkey sandwich for lunch, and I stopped by Chipotle on the way to curling for a Carnitas (pork) burrito bol. The rest of the family had homemade pizza.
On Tuesday night, we had chili garlic tilapia (prepackaged from Trader Joe's) with broccoli and brown rice.
On Wednesday night, we had dijon herb salmon with roasted potatoes and bok choy. Very yummy.
On Thursday night, we had mushroom/asiago/marscapone ravioli, which was okay, but Lisa liked it a lot.
On the menu for tonight and tomorrow are BBQ pork and lemon curry chicken soup.
But we're not stopping there. Last night, Lisa asked if I wanted to do a second week! She didn't think it was "that hard," so we agreed to go another week without red meat. I'm pretty sure we won't make it to Memorial Day though.

Since we didn't leave the bonspiel on Sunday till almost 4pm, by the time I got home, only Lisa was still awake, which meant that the kids wouldn't see me until I got home from work yesterday. They were actually over at a neighbor's house playing, and when I walked in and said hello, Evan apparently perked up and started trying to find his way across the toy-strewn floor to me. Ellie was quicker and came and gave me a quick hug. I finally found Evan and picked him up, and he just put his head on my shoulder and cuddled with me for a good solid minute or two (aww!), which for a rambunctious 16-month-old was a long time.
It was good to see them again, and I am cherishing the fact that they still do miss me when I'm gone.

If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan -- a Camry, say -- to the ultra-efficient Prius.

Via the New York Times. You just have to go read the whole article. It might just change your life. I'm one of those who just plain doesn't want to know where his food comes from most of the time, but this article really did open my eyes about the impact our habits have. Thanks to my lovely wife though, we usually have a weekly menu with only one, maybe two dinners with red meat, and we have at least one vegetarian meal weekly as well. All this is to say, get off your duff and go help Shane buy a dairy cow! If he hits his goal today, he gives up red meat until Memorial Day! That's like another 4 months for those of you who didn't major in math like me.

Yesterday, my wife asked me what my financial goals were for the year. It was spurred a bit by doing our taxes, plus the recent rate drops which momentarily had me considering another refinance (they've since jumped back up to the point that a refi doesn't make sense). I had a bunch of them, so I'm going to put them out there so that I am reminded of them later in the year.
1) Do a budget which anticipates known, but inconsistent (not monthly) expenses like curling, baseball, etc. It's not like it's a surprise that we need to pay for them, but somehow we always seem to have to scramble for the money when it comes due.
2) Adjust my paycheck withholding again so that we don't get a giant refund next year. I adjusted a small amount last March, and we are still getting a large refund. I want to stop giving the government my money during the year, only to get it back with no interest in February.
3) Increase my 401(k) contributions. I bumped up by 1% last year, I think I can do another 1-2% again this year. We are also going to look a bit closer at Lisa's side of the retirement picture, which has been largely neglected since she stopped working. Part of this may involve going to a fee-only financial planner who can help us organize our various accounts.
4) Get adequate life insurance. We finally put together our will last year, and now it's time to make sure the family is taken care of if something tragic happens. This was brought to bear recently when my co-worker's brother died unexpectedly. He was 38 and had a wife and 2 kids.
5) Start a 529 plan for Evan. Ellie is enrolled in a prepaid tuition program right now, but Evan's got nothing.
6) Get rid of debt. We don't have much, some holiday credit card bills, the minivan payment, mortgage, but I want to aggressively pay off the credit card and minivan.

Update: 7) Thanks for Shane's reminder: I need to contribute my $50 so he can buy a heifer. This should be part of a larger plan to donate more to charity this year.

It seems that after my web host upgraded PHP, it broke the piece of my code that imports my "blogroll" on the sidebar. I haven't been able to figure out what changed, but since it throws a lovely core dump every time someone hits the page, I had to take the blogroll off for now, at least until I can figure it out. I am sure it will not be missed at all.
After much procrastination, we finally got back together with our lawyer and signed our wills. And yesterday, we even paid him! It wasn't cheap, but it is good to know that we've taken care of it, so that things will be taken care of when we're gone.
No update on the dishwasher and dryer yet. Procrastinating on that until we have more time to deal with it. Yesterday we took our wet clothes over to a friend's house to dry them, and we've been hand washing dishes, which was therapeutic the first time, and annoying ever since.
We're headed up to Connecticut tonight for the Men's Club Playdowns. For curling, ya know. It's basically like the regional qualifier for the National Championship. If you want to follow along, you can check out the Nutmeg Curling Club's results page. It's a round robin tournament, so we play 7 games, one Thursday, 3 Friday, 2 Saturday, and one, with the possibility of more if we're in a tiebreaker, on Sunday. But honestly, we're just hoping to win a couple of games and get some valuable experience playing together as a team so that we can do well at the Dyke's bonspiel in February. And I'm hoping we're not in a tiebreaker so that we can make it back home in time to watch the Giants in the NFC conference championship game!

We had a "Three Kings" brunch on Saturday with a bunch of friends. Normally, a Three Kings party would involve exchanging your "worst" Christmas presents, but since a lot of what would have been exchanged would have been kids' gifts, we decided against it this year, though we may do it next year. Instead, we focused on having adult beverages for all the parents and letting the kids run around like crazy. Irish coffee and mimosas went over well (the limited bar menu also went over well with the bartender: me). Lisa took care of everyone's appetite and managed to have minimal leftovers. Unfortunately, our sink drain decided to get clogged right after she finished making everything and needed to run the dishwasher. So the dishes went into the shower until after the party. Thankfully, I was able to get the drain unclogged the following day, though I still don't know what was clogging it as nothing came out. Later that night, I turned on the Big Ten network just in time to catch the end of their win over Minnesota. Drew Neitzel had another awful game, but Raymar Morgan is establishing himself as a player (and I expect he'll be going to the NBA soon) and Kalin Lucas is a "diaper dandy" in the making.
It was a good day overall yesterday, as we started off the day returning the half-functioning heated mattress pad I bought. The "dual controls" only worked on one side of the pad, so we took it back to JC Penney. Turned out they didn't sell it in store, only online, but the customer service rep was really nice and reordered a new one for me, which they are going to ship to our house directly, for no charge. I figured I'd at least have to pay shipping again, but they didn't even charge me for that. Nice. Then we went and picked up some new towels and found out after we had left the store that they only charged us for one of the four towels. 4 towels for $4.19, very nice for us.
After we got home, I caught up on the Tivo-ed action of the Giants-Bucs game. Lucky for me I could skip through most of that bad first quarter and get to the good parts of the 2nd quarter quickly. During halftime, I successfully snaked the drain, then went back downstairs to catch up on the action and follow the victory. I'm still an Eli skeptic, but didn't that 8 1/2 minute TD drive in the fourth quarter remind you of the long TD drive in the Giants' Super Bowl XXV victory over the Bills? OK, maybe that's going a bit too far, but it was a nice drive all-around, even if I'm not convinced, as some pundits are, that it was a big step in Eli's maturation process. I'm still a wait-and-see guy on that front.
We then went to the curling club for our usual Sunday pizza and game, where I somehow lucked into getting a ringer substitute for our game, which we won easily. The coming weeks are going to be very busy, curling-wise, as I travel to Connecticut for the Club National Championship playdowns (sort of like a regional qualifier for the Club National Championship) and then to Schenectady for the Dykes (5 years or less curling experience) bonspiel in February. We got a nice deal on a nice hotel for Connecticut on Priceline too. The 3 star Marriott is only about 7 minutes from the bonspiel and normally would have cost us $660 for 4 nights, but we got it for $300. The "discount" rate at the Courtyard that they were giving us would have cost us about $100 more too, so we got a pretty good deal, I'd say. By the way, if anyone has anything they think we should do while in the Bridgeport area, we're open to suggestions, since we will probably have a decent amount of downtime during the weekend.

After 10 days in Michigan, and digging out of the 10+ inches of snow that was dumped on us the LAST DAY we were there, and almost 13 hours on the road, we made it back home last night. I can't tell you how good it felt to sleep in my own bed last night, and to have my own freshly ground and brewed coffee this morning. I'm slowly catching up on all my email and news, and hopefully will be back with more this afternoon. I managed to read two more books while I was gone, but since I didn't review them yet, I'm going to count them toward next year's total and give myself a head start.
Overall, we had a good time in Michigan, though Ellie would have loved it if that snow had come a few days earlier. And don't ask me about King-Five suited. Fold that crap, stupid! Christmas was fun for the kids, though Ellie has been complaining about how she didn't get her Dora baby twins and some other stuff (I'm sure my parents will quickly say how familiar that sounds!). Evan is the ultimate in giving positive feedback though. His face when he got his Ikea push toy just lit up, and he's hardly put the thing down since. And Lisa and I even got to go see a movie! (National Treasure 2, which was a mild disappointment, but still fairly fun, especially when you can say that you've seen the Resolute desk up close.)
OK, time to catch up on work.

We're nearing the end of 2007, so it's time once again for my favorite stuff of the past year.
I tried 28 new beers this year and came up with one new summer favorite, Dogfish Head Festina Pêche and two new winter favorites which both tied my all-time best beer rating, Bell's Kalamazoo Stout and Dogfish Head World Wide Stout.
It was a prolific year of reading for me, as I raced through 45 books! Ten of those books managed to garner 5 stars, but my overall favorite was The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. The other 5 star ratings went to Maxed Out, I Love You, Beth Cooper, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Little Children, Soon I Will Be Invincible, Boomsday, The Zero, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and Lisey's Story.
We had a great vacation to Disney World, including our awesome dinner at Victoria and Albert's.
Favorite event (outside of kids walking and other various accomplishments): buying our minivan
Favorite album: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga by Spoon. I really dig this band.
Favorite new TV show: Pushing Daisies. The most visually interesting new show of the year, and it even manages to breath new life (har) into the old "will they or won't they?" saga.
Another year has passed, but I look forward, as always, to the excitement of the new year ahead.

First, I'm absolutely puzzled about this Guitar Hero thing. No one has fessed up to buying it off my wishlist, so I'm baffled. What's also strange is that Amazon shows that it ships in 1-2 months, while I have seen it in stores at Costco and Microcenter, but the Wii version is completely out of stock everywhere (tip: sign up for Nowinstock.net's email alerts. They have a GH3 for Wii one too, and I could have bought it from Costco.com or Amazon yesterday if I hadn't already been in hot water for buying the Wii).
I canceled the last of my freebie signups today. I've qualified and been confirmed for a $500 Best Buy gift card and a $500 Visa gift card so far, and I think I will try for a $500 Lowes card next, since we need new doors for our basement and upstairs. You can see what I signed up for on this spreadsheet (the first two sheets are what I did). To summarize, for the first card, I paid $13.94 net, which included 50 songs from eMusic (I bought Spoon's latest and a bunch of versions "Jingle Bells" for Ellie, eMusic is also very easy to cancel by logging into your account on the website). I gave away the cat litter (and they canceled my trial via email without me really asking them to). Today I canceled Critic's Choice, even though I was tempted to keep it so that I could buy some gift cards for Christmas at a discount. On the second card, I actually made $6.35, thanks to the $20 Exxon gas card that Great Fun sent me. They were also the most annoying to cancel, though it wasn't horrible. They just offered more stuff for staying signed up, but I really wasn't interested. Grant Consultant canceled via email, real easy. And Rising Star was a tiny bit of a hassle just because it required shipping stuff back to them.
So there you have it, all told, I spent $30.58 out of pocket, got a $2.99 refund and a $20 gas card, for a net $7.59 spent. And for that, I should be getting $1000 worth of gift cards in a couple of months.

Since I haven't yet been able to figure out who got it for me, would the person who bought the Guitar Hero 3 for PC off my Amazon wishlist please email me? I just managed to snag a Wii from Amazon, and I'd like to switch my request to the Wii version. I don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I just didn't get the Wii until now. Anyway, if the person who bought it reads this, get in touch with me so we can figure out how to switch if it's still possible.

Wow, a lot of stuff happened this weekend. Quick summary: Thanksgiving dinner, ate too much; Ellie's first sleepover; Ellie doesn't want to come home the next day, which is fine since we need to buy our new Honda Odyssey EX-L; ran a bunch of errands on Saturday, so much room in this minivan!; raked and cleaned the gutters; put up Christmas decorations; hit the Kennedy Center to see Sandra Boynton (author of many children's books) and Davy Jones (yes, THAT Davy Jones, click here to watch the performance from the comfort of your own home rather than having to stand for an hour holding a toddler on your shoulders)!
Whew! I'm still sorting through all the crap I need to take care of as part of trading in our old car and buying the new minivan, but I'm finally getting there. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to put up some pictures of our sweet new ride. And yes, I am serious, it is sweet! Leather, heated seats, power sliding passenger doors, totally configurable seating, including the fold-into-floor third row, moonroof, individual climate controls (Lisa can set hers to be warmer than mine), 6 disc CD player, etc, etc. I will also have a followup post on the buying process, which will explain how I worked the price down to $26200 out the door, and got it from the most conveniently located dealer, and in the color we wanted! Now to take care of all the work that's been stacking up on me.

Intactivism is going mainstream. Time magazine even has an article out about it. While I'm not as gung ho about it as the people quoted, I can at least say my actions speak for me: Evan is intact. Lisa left the decision to me, since it was a guy thing, and I just couldn't come up with any good reason to do it (because everyone else is doing it isn't a very good reason). Of interest in the article, to me, was that even Jews are hopping on board, replacing the bris with the brit shalom, a cut-free ceremony.
Lisa's a quiet lactivist, I'm a quiet intactivist. And now you know.

I've got almost everything squared away on the website upgrade now. The main page has all the links back to the sub-pages, and is aggregating new stuff nicely (notice the splash of color in the entry titles to correspond with the source?). I figured out the category archive bug that was confusing me, so now the category archives show everything in the category, instead of the past N entries. My own page has all the junk on the sidebar I used to have, minus the book widget, which I still need to figure out. That one may take a while, because the plugin I used for that has changed dramatically, and it also didn't import the old records like it was supposed to (though it didn't destroy them either). I may have to dust off some SQL-fu to hack my way around that, though there is also a different plugin that may end up doing something similar to what I want.
As a reward to myself, I'm going to be picking up a FREE bar and 4 barstools sometime this weekend. I honestly have no clue what they look like, nor do I care. It's a free bar, and I want it. Now I just have to get my neighbor to let me borrow his truck so I can go pick it up! Woo! Man, I hope it doesn't suck.

I'm not a big social network guy. I do have a Facebook account, and a while back I joined LinkedIn at the urging of my brother, but didn't really do anything beyond sending invites to a bunch of people in my address book and letting it sit there. Over the past week though, I've been trudging through the list of people who work at my company and who went to MSU at the same time I did. The list of people who attended MSU at some point between 1992-1996 who are on LinkedIn is currently 8494 people long. Which brings me to my point. I am not likely to remember all the Tims and Johns that I went to school with, especially not when browsing through 284 pages of names. But I am likely to remember people with names like Cruikshank and Chapin, and those people are more than likely going to remember Dauernheim. As a result, in the past week, I've expanded my first degree "network" by 50%, and my third degree network has added over 22000 people since October 22. Interestingly enough, my connections go from DC to Pennsylvania, to Michigan, to Kansas, all the way out to California and Washington. Good news if I ever want to move to Seattle.
By the way, it is seriously creepy sometimes how LinkedIn figures out that you might know people. I guess because I let it pull my GMail address book, and GMail automatically adds people to the address book, even if you didn't email them directly, but that only explains some of it. The woman my wife worked with when she moved to DC 10 years ago? Never would have thought of her, but as I said before, she'll probably remember my wife's last name.

How about a break from book reviews for a while? I've been chugging through those pretty well lately, and I'm pretty close to a pace that would put me at 52 for the year, or one book a week, which I never thought I'd be able to do. We'll see if I can keep it up.
It's been a busy month already, with a ton of birthdays (plus one more baby that was born last Thursday, congrats to Playground Mom!), and it's going to get busier this week with the first curling bonspiel of the year. I'm playing with a guy that I played with before, and we're forming up a team that will travel to beautiful Schenectady, NY for the Dykes bonspiel. The Dykes is for players with 5 years or less of experience, and since I sat out last year, I have one more year of eligibility. I'm excited about our chances, hopefully we'll have a good team.
Of course, I'm still playing baseball on Sundays. Last week, we played a bunch of high schoolers, all of whom could throw harder than any of us. I struck out twice, once on a good AB, the second on a pitch up in my eyes, then grounded to short, and then beat out a chopper to third. We played them close but still ended up losing. This Sunday could be interesting if our curling team makes it to play in a final, while I also have a 9am baseball game. Unfortunately, the Redskins also play at 1pm on Sunday, and FedEx Field is smack dab in between the baseball field and the curling club. Ugh.
Congrats to the Rockies, who defied all odds and continued their hot streak all the way to the World Series. I sucked in my playoff picks, didn't I? Go Indians! Beat the Red Sox!
Not to jinx anything, but how bout them Giants? 4-2 after an awful 0-2 start. If we could just stop Eli from throwing stupid picks in the last 2 minutes of a half, I'd feel a lot better. Even so, we have very winnable games at home against San Fran, and in London against Miami before a bye week and a rematch against the Cowboys at home. That is shaping up to be a huge game for the NFC East if things keep up.
Look for another book review later this week!

There's an interesting dynamic that comes with being the only dad at the playground (every day at 4pm-ish) with a bunch of moms. I'm the one who will push the kids higher on the swings, and then let them kick me while swinging (some harder than others, what's up with that?). I'm also the guy who has to yell at the bigger kids to get off the roof of the storage shed, etc, but that's not a big deal since I am a cranky old codger who's always yelling at the cars to slow down and the kids to get off my lawn (luckily, not my driveway, yet). But one of the biggest things came to my attention yesterday, when our neighbor Isabelle arrived at the playground gate and all the kids proceeded to start climbing the fence. One or two of the other moms warned the kids to get down, but they kept going. At that point, I bellowed from 20 yards away "Everybody off the fence!" and everyone quickly got down. Another mom congratulated me, "Way to use your Dad voice." I had never thought about it before, but sometime in the past 5 years or so, I've definitely gained some sort of authority to my voice which wasn't there before. And I think that's kinda cool.

My buddy John was here visiting this weekend, so we had lots of fun times. On Thursday night, we headed out to Rustico, which has a nice long beer list. I had one of my favorites, Festina Peche, on tap, and also had the Rogue Half-A-Weizen (much hoppier than a normal hefeweizen) to go with my shrimp pizza.
On Friday night, Lisa had her book club, so John and I took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese. We had originally planned to go to the Nats game, but it was raining, so we wimped out. The Nats ended up playing the whole game in the rain, good thing we didn't go. We arrived home in time to catch the Yankees comeback against the Red Sox. It would have been hard to miss it, it went so damn late. I had better starting storing up the sleep for the postseason.
On Saturday, we headed out to Glory Days to catch the first half of the MSU-Pitt game. Another decent win for MSU, and hopefully they will pummel the Irish this week too. We tried to go down to Mount Vernon for some stuff they had going on there, but the parking lot was packed, no spots anywhere, so we ended up going to a little park by the river for a bit, and then out for ice cream. We got home to catch up on the Spartans second half, and to watch the Yankees get crushed. Lisa and I combined to make a fine dinner of pecan crusted pork chops, broccoli and mac n cheese. I even popped open the Liefman's Kriek, since I had someone to drink the big bottle with. Very cherry, yum.
On Sunday morning, we headed out to the Fractured Prune for donuts before taking John to the airport. The Orange Creamsicle donut was better than I expected, and the Black Forest one was just okay. In my baseball game Sunday, I was at third base, and the pitcher was throwing from the windup, and not looking at me. I told myself I was going if he didn't look over at me and I was able to get a walking lead, I was going. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened, and I took off. Unfortunately, I paused coming up against the right-handed hitter, and had to make an awkward slide around him, but managed to stick my hand on the corner of the plate. Safe! yelled the ump. I think it's time for me to retire, there's nothing left for me to accomplish. We won the game too. I got back home and iced my arm while watching the Giants fourth quarter implosion against the Packers. Hey, they really weren't doing that awful, but after the Packers went up 21-13, they fumbled the kickoff giving Green Bay a short field, and Eli threw that awful interception when they were driving for a score. Ah, who am I kidding? They made Brett Favre of 2007 look like Brett Favre of 1995. They are going to have to retool that defense, especially the linebackers, who can't cover a tight end to save their lives. Thankfully, the Yankees came through late against Curt Schilling, and Mariano held on for the save, which they really needed after the Tigers crept up on them b