Woah it’s been awhile. I have been proccupied I guess. Last week I was in Tampa for CCNA training. It was a good class. I am looking to go for that test in January or February. It looks good on a resume.

Yesterday was my birthday. 35 now. It almost seems unimagineable that I am that old but sadly I am. I still feel ok, and stay in shape but my lifelong fear of aging just gets worse with each passing birthday. It sucks. However Ali did her best to make it a good birthday. She got me a new set of golf clubs which I have been talking about for years. The clubs I had were close to 20 years old. The bag was from Goodwill and in miserable shape. I can’t wait to go out and hit the new ones. I also got an Xbox game and the Star Wars Episode II DVD as well as a gift card to Best Buy. Some rockin good gifts!

I am pretty much done with Xmas shopping. I did it all almost exclusively online. So much easier.

We pull out for PA for our 1200 mile drive Saturday. We would like to take the car because it is more comfortable for a long drive as well as getting better gas mileage. However, we may be forced into taking the truck due to a lack of space to put all the stuff. 🙁

I have been snagging a lot of stuff to make another RC plane. Why? Oh I don’t know, crazy I guess.

I also have been testing out the video editing capabilities of the new puter. It renders much faster than the old one so it makes it less laborious to do video editing. Look for a new volleyball video soon. 🙂

I am in Tampa all week at CCNA training. I went to the local mall at lunch, it was jam packed. However, Santa was there all alone. It was an odd site to see Santa sitting there with his picture taking elf looking back and forth with nothing to do. One of those moments that will stick with me. I was also able to do a little Christmas shopping for Ali.

I brought my Xbox with me so I can hook it up in the hotel room and game away. Played some last night and had a blast. I also used the hotel’s “gym” equipment circa 1980 last night. The stuff was ancient but I was able to get a decent workout in.

The weather yesterday was nasty. 60’s and raining. I heard this year is another El Nino year so that translates into a wetter then normal winter down here. I shouldn’t complain, up north they had a big snow already and the temperatures are in the teens…..brutal.

2 weeks till Christmas, yikes. By this time in 2 weeks we will have made the long drive back up to PA for the holidays. It should be a good time.

Did legs hard at the gym last night. No exercise that is less fun than legs. But, my leg strength is getting better slowly so I guess it is paying off. Last night I made my first DVD on my new puter. I had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get the formatting correct but the final product is sweet. I have all sorts of ideas of what I can do. I just need to figure out a couple technical issues and then do a lot of dubbing. Video production is cool.

First day back from a 4 day Thanksgiving weekend. It was a very enjoyable 4 days.

On Thanksgiving we watched a good deal of the Macy’s parade. For the first time EVER we did not have Thanksgiving dinner with friend’s or relative’s. We went out to dinner at the Watermark. It was a very nice change. No hours of preparation and hours of cleanup afterward. The food was GREAT. Evidently others have already caught onto the idea because it was quite full. After dinner we did another first, we went to Kmart and did some Christmas shopping. When I got home I flew my plane and had a horrific crash into some trees. It busted it up into several pieces. However, with the aid of 5 minute epoxy and packing tape I was able to repair it to the point where it flies again. 🙂

Afterwards we watched some football, made the calls to the family and relaxed. A good holiday.

Friday was bust ass outside day. I weed whacked the entire property, pruned the palm trees and mowed it. Took about 4-5 hours total. It was a lot of work but the temperature was in the upper 60’s so it was perfect yardwork weather. It should be the last mowing I have to do for several months. I also got to do some gaming with my Xbox and played Unreal Championship on it. It was sweet. I also hung our Chrsitmas lights. We decided to not do a Christmas tree this year because we are going to be gone for over a week during Christmas so we don’t want to come back to a dead tree.

Saturday we spent the day preparing for our first party at the house. Ali busted ass preparing everything. I had to do a last minute shopping trip to grab some chicken fingers because we thought we may be a little light on the main meal department. Our baked macaroni and cheese didn’t look very big. The party went surprisingly well. Our only other attempt at hosting a party happened years ago up north when we lived in Wernersville. That was a flop. This time it went well, we had 12 people there in total. The last few left around 12:30. We had quite the mess to clean up but it was worth it. Hopefully we get to do more in the future.

Sunday I slept till 10 am which NEVER happens. I must have been tired. It was cold (for Florida) and rainy all day so I hardly stepped out the door. I spent the day watching football, working on the computer and playing on the xbox. A 4 star day. The Eagles won a tight game and there were a bunch of other good games on the dish. It was one of the best Thanksgiving holidays I have had in a long time. Very enjoyable. Now the Christmas crunch begins.

I’m not a gun man but this is amazing.

Wow what an Eagles game. A tremendous win that was a joy to watch. It is too bad Koy got hurt, he performed much better than I expected. Good for him. Next week they have the Rams at home. Hopefully they can drive the final nail in the coffin for them.

My one fish (Fishy) at work was acting a little lethargic yesterday, he seems better today. I hope he is ok.

Boy I’m tired, it’s a DD coffee kind of morning.

Monday is here but it is only a 3 day week so it should fly by. Friday night we went over to our friend’s house and had a nice dinner and watched Monsters Inc. That movie is great! Very funny. It is incredible what they can do with computer based animation.

On Saturday I spent 4 hours on the tractor mowing down my neighbor and our back yards. In total it was probably close to 3 acres of 2-3 foot high grass I mowed. It was pretty brutal. It was very windy so when I mowed the one direction I was deluged with flying grass clippings. My ears were filled with grass and my eyes were beet red from all the junk that got in them. Well at least that should be the last that I have to mow it for 3-4 months.

I got to fly my airplane quite a bit this weekend. Ali shot some great video of some of the flights. Check it out here. The plane flies great, especially with the new high duration battery pack.

On Sunday I finished up getting the old computer ready for resale. It took some doing to get XP home back on it but it all worked out. The new computer is working well.

On Sunday we also dug up some small pines on the unoccupied lot next to ours. We could use a few of them so we didn’t see a problem with it. We are pissed off at that property owner anyway. I had contacted them awhile back asking them to give us first shot at buying the property if they decided to sell it. The lady was very rude and said she wasn’t interested in selling it. Well the property is now for sale under a real estate agent. Bitch. The lot is 150 foot wide lot. Our is a 180 foot lot. This lot is selling for close to DOUBLE what ours cost less than 2 years ago. Amazing.

The pool is a bit chilly, 68 degrees last time I checked. Not polar bear swim territory but cold enough! It was an awesome weekend weather wise. Mid 70’s, no humidity, perfect.

The Eagles play their first game without Donovan tonight. Hopefully they can raise their game a notch to compensate.

Found out some interesting news. They are planning to have a large catholic university a few miles from our house!! I heard the property values have basically skyrocketed overnight. They are expecting for it to be done 2005-2006. Wow that would be something else. I even heard ideas they have about having a big time athletics program. It looks like we really hit the jackpot as far as property placement goes.

Big job this weekend is to give the grass a good cutting. It will take 3 or 4 hours but it should be the end of it till spring.

Lots of gaming and RC plane flying this weekend!

The Bachelor finale was on last night. He picked who I thought he would. Although the woman has an incredibly annoying nervous laugh that she does incessantly. She also talks during kissing which could be a real pain in the ass. He actually proposed which was quite surprising. Hope it works out but I doubt it.

Went out early this morning to fly my plane. Thick fog made it a little tough as well as creating a risk from water on the electronics. It was fun anyway. I did my first low altitude roll. I hope to get a lot of flying time in this weekend.

Wow I can’t believe it is the end of November. The holidays really seem to creep up on you down here because of the weather. It doesn’t seem possible for it to be Thanksgiving because it is 80 degrees and beautiful. I guess I will get used to it. I suppose the Christmas shopping must commence soon. Yuk.

3 day work week next week! Should be great. We are supposed to have a “party” next Saturday. The guest list is small and getting smaller. It may wind up just being us and one other couple. Coordinating parties sucks.

Last night at the gym I did 6 plates each side on the leg press 4 times. A new personal best. Yea, who cares but I was happy about it. My bad knee has definitely been better since I cut back on the vball and started taking that wonderfully slimy and bad tasting flaxseed oil. Yep it tastes bad but has all sorts of good stuff in it for you. Chasing it with a shot of OJ minimizes the aftertaste.

Here is another gym gripe for ya. Put the plates back in order! How annoying is it when you are trying to get plates for the barbells and someone has but 5’s, 10′, 25’s and 45’s all on the same arm of the weight tree? Drives me crazy that people are too lazy to put them back in order. How damn hard is it? People suck.

If you are considering buying a new pc, DO NOT buy it here. These idiots have jerked around a friend of mine on a system he bought like you would not believe. They have been saying the system has been shipping for 2 weeks, it still hasn’t shipped. A bunch of rip off artists. I can’t stand companies like that.

Well I got a DVD-RW disk finally. Expensive little bugger. 10 bucks. So I threw it in my pc and used the Sony DVD app to copy a small 10 meg video file to it. It only burns at 1X so it took awhile. That was successful so I tried to burn another file to it. No can do. Evidently the program closed the disk so no further writing was possible! Argggggh! A 4.7 gig rewriteable disk now has 1 10 meg file on it with no further writing possible. DAMN IT! I guess I will get the hang of it eventually. I want to be able to rip my vball videos all to one DVD and have it playable in a DVD drive.

I think I have the PC set up as I want it. Using XP Home is a bit of a pain but I don’t feel like loading hacked Pro and then have the issues with updates. It does what I need it to.