Another year come and gone...

Yes, its December 30th; tomorrow is new years eve. What a year! Christmas was fantastic this year, particularly given that we decided to reduce the gift-giving action to a minimum. The laptop that I'm typing this on, though the sexiest laptop I've ever used, has nevertheless pretty much tied up my monetary resources for the next four months in credit card payments, and as we know, money is pretty tight all the way around. But as usual, Cynthia's gifts were the most creative and will be the most memorable. Rather than getting Kevin and I material stuff, she bought us all tickets to see Jeff Dunham at the Convention Center. For those who've not heard of him, he's a ventriloquist, without a doubt the best in the business! I thought that ventriloquism had been pretty much played out by now, but oh my GOD this guy truly takes the art to new heights!

We busted up laughing so much that we all had sore throats by the time we got home. I'd already seen his shows on Comedy Central, including the xmas show, but there's nothing like seeing him live. Something that we will never forget! Cynthia's so good at that. I still have vivid and fond memories of the glider flight that she gave me for my 39th birthday. I can't even TELL you what a great time it was, though I have ample pictures from it that I'll post as soon as I figure out how.

We went to Cynthia's aunt's house in Golden for some xmas festivities, and we did a late gift unwrapping at my parents house in Broomfield. Good times all around! My parents had great gifts for us, and they seemed pleased as punch with their gifts as well. It was a nicer evening than the previous ones that week; it's been bitter cold around Colorado this month. But the cold let up that day, and though the trip from the Convention Center to home was rather crisp, overall it wasn't too bad.

What else... I wrote a review of this new laptop, the Hewlett-Packard HP HDX 18, and I sent it to a guy at notebookreview.com yesterday. Still haven't heard back; if they don't publish it then I'm hoping I can get it published somewhere else in cyberspace, if only as an example of my writing style. I'm a technical writer at heart, and it would be nice to have a portfolio piece of some kind to show people. I worked on it for days, and even took some good pictures of the laptop to go with the review. Supposedly notebookreview.com pays $40 to $60 per review, all in Paypal funny money of course, but we'll see if they get back to me.

I have sort of a Jones to do some online courses, so as to continue ye olde learning process. I ordered a course catalog from my old alma mater, Colorado State University, but from what I can tell, they still don't have this whole online learning thing down real well as yet. Most of the few courses they offer relate to a major of some kind, and there were only one or two courses that I saw per endeavor. My sister has written course descriptions for Capella University, a solid online school in Minnesota, and I keep meaning to check them out. As long as the prices are reasonable, I see no problem with taking all the online courses I can get.

Kevin will be going to online high school starting the upcoming semester. Brick-and-mortar school has not been kind to him, a situation which I PROMISE you I can relate to! If ONLY there had been online school when I was in high school. All of the learning, none of the bulls$%#$t; who could ask for anything more? We'll see how it goes, but I don't see how it could be any worse than this past semester for him. The whole structured learning thing isn't for everyone, and though you have to be willing to do the work in order to get the benefit (in EVERYTHING you do), the WAY in which the work is done can in some cases be adapted to fit the learner. We'll see if said adaptations will help to get the job done.

Oh my God, the dog just FLEW out of bed and went running out to bark at the neighbor dog, right as Cynthia is trying to sleep!! URK!! Overall it's been a much better year around here for Charlie the Italian Greyhound than last year. We were going to get an IG from an actual IG rescue group, but we've found that breed-specific rescue and breeding groups tend to be real snotty about who they allow to adopt their dogs. They have all these strict guidelines as to how many hours a day you're home vs. how many you're gone, what you feed the dog, all kinds of stuff that's really not any of their business; they just mainly need to know that the dog won't be abused. But they even send mouth-breathing "adoption agents" to your house to make sure that your home will be an acceptable one. Our answer to such zealotry and snottiness: "Bite me!!" So we adopted from the Dumb Friends League, and had quite the opposite experience: they were really helpful in all kinds of different ways, they gave Charlie plenty of time to meet us at the shelter, they gave is verbal and printed advice on how to raise an IC, and we even got him fixed and got a microchip embedded in him as part of the adoption. How cool was that!

Charlie is skittish by nature, and he still doesn't fully trust me, though he's completely taken to Cynthia and Kevin. He's a mama's boy, and he clings to Cynthia like white on white for the most part. Which is justice, since she's the one who most wanted a dog and the one who's worked at a vet's office before so knows something about raising dogs in general. Charlie started out with severe house training issues but has gotten a lot better.

He pretty much ruined the carpet in the dining room, but as it happens, that turned out to be a good thing! Cynthia was reading the Castle Rock want ads last spring and came across an ad from a clearinghouse in Denver that was selling Pergo-type laminate hardwood, really good stuff at a reduce price. I was skeptical, of course; claims of "overstock" to me usually rank right up there with claims that there's a large sum of money awaiting me in Russia!! But we went to this warehouse in Denver to look at it, in this dump of a neighborhood (really made me appreciate OUR hood!). The color of the slats turned out to be this nice deep dark brown, and the quality was excellent. So we loaded my SUV and Cynthia's station wagon full of laminate hardwood. I should have taken a picture of the cars; we totally turned them into low-riders!! Which like I say, fit right in with the hood! We thought about installing it ourselves, but in the end decided to have it done. That was definitely the right move; they made it look SWEEET! That floor is just uber sexy now! We're now considering getting hardwood for the loft as well, though again with the economy the way it is, that's ways out.

Cynthia got a superfly new job last month at MX Logic, doing tier I help desk work. They filter spam e-mail messages out of their customers' e-mail systems. Pretty cool stuff! That leaves me at the school system, doing tier II computer support. Cynthia commute is now about 10 to 15 minutes, and I'm jealous!! Mine is still like 45 minutes. DOH! I like the school district; it's the town it's IN that sucks IMHO, and ultimately that town may be too much for me to handle. It's the crime capital of the state, yet cops still seem to somehow find time to dork with me in the course of driving from school to school. Some WEIRD people out there too let me tell ya!! So I may someday have to give it up, but for now I stick with it.

One of our co-workers gave us a kitten in June, and she is of course EPIC cute! We named her Kawaii; Kevin is a student of Japanese and tells us that Kawaii is Japanese for "cute". Fair enough, since she is DEFINITELY that!! It's a very good thing that we got her, too, because Sampson the orange tabby cat STILL has not come back. Cynthia and Kevin fear the worst, but I think he's still out there, and he'll come back in the summer sometime. We didn't know just how much of an outdoor cat he really was, until he started slipping out the dog door this spring. Little twerp! But we have a lot of good pictures and videos of him to remember him by in the even that he doesn't come back.

Well that's the update for now; I'll figure out how to get pictures on this thing and get some up!


--Brian