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Happy New Year

January 4, 2009 / Paul posted in Family and Friends, The Day To Day, Travels / No Comments

December was full of good times and bad.

“The Bad” involved stressful work over weekends, a shower that’s falling apart, and a trip to West Texas that was cut short due to an allergic reaction that left me with swollen eyes. At work, the deadlines placed on the release of software were uncomfortably close to the holidays. There were new requirements that were added very close to the release date. I worked two weekends to make sure everything was done. The combination of the three made things a might stressful. Our master bathroom shower tiles started having cracks in the grout. To repair them, I started chipping away the old grout and ended up pulling a dozen or so tiles off the wall. The tiles were placed directly onto the dry wall without treatment which led to the deterioration of the dry wall in some places. Alexis and I are currently weighing our options of what to do, repair or remodel.For the holidays, we drove to Odessa and then to Lubbock. In Odessa, I came in contact with something that I am allergic to. My eyelids swelled up, but my eyeballs were fine. No redness, just swollen, puffy, uncomfortable eyelids and eye sockets. The drive to Lubbock was fine, but it didn’t improve my condition. It wasn’t until I went to the doctor back home that I improved. My theory is that I was allergic to Eucalyptus at my Dad’s house and the allergens stuck to my pillow where it followed me to Lubbock. Alexis has washed my pillow about three times now.

“The Good” in December actually out numbers the bad. Alexis and I had our eight year anniversary, the trip to West Texas was fun, and gifts were exchanged.Alexis and I have been married for eight years and to celebrate we bought a 42 inch HD TV. The eight years have gone by so very fast. Our trip to Odessa and Lubbock was fun despite my allergic reaction. I enjoyed visiting family and eating great food. One day that I wasn’t all puffy and had a lot of fun was with my two brothers. My brothers, Alexis, and I had an awesome time at Fast Eddie’s in Odessa. Fast Eddie’s is a pool hall that didn’t exist while I lived in Odessa. If it had, my best friend, Kevin and I would have visited it on a regular basis. After eating lunch at Rosa’s, we all played pool and darts into the evening. In all we spent about six hours there.Gift exchange this year was rewarding. I bought Alexis a portable photo light box for taking pictures with consistent lighting and low shadows. She has started using it to take pictures of the shrinky dinks she makes and may eventually sell. I also bought her a Nintendo DS game that she played a demo of a month ago, called Soul Bubbles. She bought me a Xbox 360 game called Dead Rising, two books I heard about on NPR, and a Firefly graphic novel that prompted us to have a Firefly marathon after we both read it.

Despite “The Bad” in December it ended on a good note and I resolve to never let a month go by again when I don’t update my blog. Although she hasn’t said it aloud, I believe Alexis has resolved the same for her website. Happy New Year!

Happy New Year

January 6, 2008 / Paul posted in Family and Friends, Movies, Television, Travels / No Comments

I hope my last post didn’t imply that my trip to Michigan was a bad one. In fact it was great. The majority of the time was spent in-doors which seemed a lot warmer than the last few visits. Alexis’ parents installed pellet burners which helped keep things nice and toasty. On the last day of our stay, I did venture out-doors into the wind and snow for about 15 minutes.

For entertainment, we went to see “Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in the theaters and watched “The Hogfather” on TV. Out of the two I found that the Hogfather was the most memorable. Mostly because the villian in Hogfather was extremely creepy and disturbed. At first I didn’t know what to make of his character. He seemed like a smallish strange looking fellow. As the show progressed though the more demonstrative he became. The rest of Hogfather was good too. DEATH was hilarious when he was filling in for Hogfather/Santa. The ending delivered a great message about the meaning of Christmas. Although through the show I was a little annoyed with the wizards. It seemed too distracting to the rest of the story. DEATH, DEATH’s granddaughter, and the villian, Teatime, were enough to keep up with. The memorable parts of Sweeny Todd for me are Alan Rickman being a total bastard, Helena Bonharm Carter’s daydreaming sequence, and the scenes when the barber’s victims hit the floor head-first after sliding out of the chair. As far as musicals I like go it falls somewhere way below “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and a little above “The Little Shop of Horrors”.

During my visit Ed, my father-in-law, asked me to help him install Ubuntu onto his computer and make it dual-boot with Windows Vista. This was a nice little project for me over the break and I think it’s awesome he wants to learn Linux. I ran into some issues because the install disc was for Dapper Drake and the USB WiFi dongle didn’t want to work with Ubuntu. After I got the dongle working it was just a matter of downloading the packages to get it upgraded to the most recent version of Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon.

The flight back home was fine with very little problems. Alexis and I had fun, but it felt great to be back home. We had a couple more days of vacation to enjoy being back.

Next Post: Portal is freaking awesome!

Travel Woes

December 30, 2007 / Paul posted in Family and Friends, Travels, Videos / No Comments

As predicted in my last post the limo ride was much better this year. We went to this one house that had lights synchronized to music. Below is video of the light show:

The limo ride ended late and the next day our flight was leaving at six o’clock in the morning. To top things off American Airlines would not let us check-in online, which meant we needed to be at the airport at four in the morning. I ended up with an hour worth of sleep.

When we arrived at the ticket counter it wasn’t open. After an hour of waiting, we got our tickets only to wait in line again at security. They only had one lane open and an un-attended VIP line which ended up just merging into the normal line. Boarding started just as we were arriving to the gate and I don’t see how we could have made it there any faster.

Our flight landed safely at Chicago O’Hare International Airport and we proceeded to the gate for our connecting flight. Over the intercom I heard a couple of flights being delayed due to the weather, but every time I checked our flight it was on time. Then out of the blue the flight was cancelled with absolutely no other explanation than the weather. We made our way to the counter to see if there were any other flights to Flint, Michigan, but they were all booked solid until Monday. Alexis’ parents were waiting in Flint to pick us up. Panic started to set in. We didn’t know Michigan well enough to pick a different airport to fly into and Alexis was unable to get her parents on the cell. The lady at the counter ended up giving us a flight into Kalamazoo, Michigan, which turns out to be half the way to Flint. The map below shows where everything is located.


View Flight Problems in a larger map

I’m sure Alexis’ parents were tired of driving, but they never let on. If we were unable to get any flights then they would have ended up driving into Chicago to pick us up.

That day I learned that I couldn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a time on a plane no matter how tired I was. I immediately crashed once we made it to the house and I didn’t care that our luggage was in Flint. Alexis’ oldest brother, Jeremy, flew into Flint and picked up our luggage later that night.

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