Pinata fun! Happy new years!

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Luke playing with the pinata fun tonight. He had the honor or breaking it open. Having a ton of fun in DC with Laura, friends and all!

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On my way to DC

On my way to DC
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33.2 miles

Weeee
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78.3 miles

Driving
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108.2 miles PA border

Little break
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115.8 miles rest stop

On my way
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134.9 miles

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155.2 miles

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Tight
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173.1 miles Lewisberg

Too dark
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188.3 miles

Tired of driving pt 2
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247.5 miles

I hate Harrisburg
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267.8 miles

I love Chick-fil-A
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317.4 miles

Almost there!
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367.6 miles

Im here finally after two wrong turns and 7 hours
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410.5 miles

Game Night!

Game Night!
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Playing Settlers with the gang. Taking it easy. Tomorrow I leave for Washington, DC. I'm headed to see Laura for the new year and also gonna try to see President Ford lying in state at the Capitol sometime on Saturday or Sunday.

More gaming!
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Jake giving me a funny face during the game. Have a great night everyone!

On the road again

On the road again
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Momma cat and I on the way back to rochester

Goodbye momma
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Dusty

All the cats and nothing to eat...!

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Dusty the lone kitten right before his mother leaves him to join my household.

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The lull has come...

Sunset on the way to Christmas
Sent via camera phone by lukeawol.

So how is everyone doing? I had a great Christmas. I got what I wanted, and several people decided to dress me and bought me 5 outfits. Nice.. nicer! I love the new clothes and am rip roaring to go after Christmas shopping for more new stuff.

I got two items I really wanted. I asked for an expensive bluetooth headset for my car and I asked for stereo bluetooth headphones that not only work VERY nicely with my cell phone mp3 player, but also work great for listening to music from my computer, tv or even mp3 player. The sound is rich and very full. Rockin. I got everything on my list and more. Plus I get to see Laura in a few days in DC! This week is going to be dull, but hey, I'm going to enjoy it. Now to get to bed before 3am. I haven't kicked that habit yet.

By the way, my mom's new fridge arrived today. A little late for Christmas, but she loves it none the less. Yes, yes, I bought my mom a new refrigerator. And she likes it. Even if she yelled at me for buying it for her. Oh well, what are mom's for?

The most wonderful time of the year.

The most wonderful time of the year.
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At my aunt's house for Christmas eve, as we do every year. We're opening presents, exchanging jokes, having a merry time. Another aunt made everyone quesadillas. Happy Holidays! We'll catch up in the next couple of days.

Happy Holidays!

Been a good week. Went by quick. And my boss is out on vacation for the next two weeks. But not much to write about. Except I didn't come home Wednesday night. Here's some pictures I took this week. Gonna head to my mom's soon.

Happy Holidays everyone!

This week in pictures....

I finally got my memory card for my phone, so now I can get the pictures I want off the card easily and can put the music on the phone I want simply. So here's a summation of the last week in pictures. :)

Waking up to this every morning...



Being friends with this guy and playing board games...



Celebrating this little girl's birthday...



Working with this guy....



Holiday parties with my coworkers...



A free buffet dinner at the Racing Casino....



Dinner with my mother at the mall....



And mexican food and Casino Royale with the board games crowd...

A fun week indeed. :)

Another ill weekend ahead

I never got sick growing up. I had perfect attendance all throughout middle school and parts of high school. I prided myself on being healthy, even if I was horribly large. But as I'm getting older, things ache, I get ill and I've been even known to get a headache. Well, my leg was bothering me back in November when I visited Laura, and then now my ear has been bothering me for 3 weeks. It got to the point of bad pain when I flew to Ohio last week and it's very annoying to try to sleep through it. My doctor told me today that he thinks I might be congested (even though I feel fine in that regard). So I'm taking this mist stuff I have to inhale and am to pick up Sudafed for a week.

Last night Nola and I had a wonderful dinner at Desert Moon, that tex-mex place near Jefferson Road in Henrietta. It was very pleasant, except for all the men in the place hitting on Nola. I found it entertaining, but Nola would rather not have that attention. The previous night, I went to a really cool VIP party with Deb in Canandaigua. Nice sit down meal, meeting some new people and fun conversation. I wasn't the VIP, but I had a good time being the date.

I signed up for a text messaging plan. I never thought I'd enjoy it, but I'm liking the idea of sending video and picture messages to people and to the blog. So once it kicks in, expect more fun on Flickr and this here place. And let me know if you have a plan so I can send ya stuff when I'm out and about.

I want to go lie down. I don't feel well and this seems to happen every time I eat as of late. What's going on, here?

Civil Union-ized?

Cool.

Credit Profile going up, up, up!

Yay, my credit score is the highest it's ever been! I'm almost Suze Orman level! Two more levels and I think I get bonus powers to heal and regenerate wounds. ;)

Addicting game

Someone I know wrote this a couple years ago. Still a fan favorite of mine. :) I got bored during lunch and got the highest score I've ever had (7 million on level 72). I finally quit cause not even the Borg could defeat me.

A little sick, but still hanging in there

So yes, I've been a bit obsessed with my phone. But it'll wear off, promise. But I think it's really cool I can post pictures from my phone to the blog without any trouble at all. If I'm somewhere fun and want you to see it, poof, it's posted. And I think I have all my phone numbers moved over now (save for Remi) so I'm good again.

Did I mention that my graduation ceremony is in June? Did I mention that I'll be in California for my brother's wedding that week? Did I mention I'm going on a 3 week vacation?? Haven't bought the tickets yet. It seems that they're down to $250 or so round trip. That's cheaper than my trip to Ohio, and that's a neighboring state! What sense does that make?

This past weekend was great. Not only did I recover from my travel sickness on Friday, but I hung out with some friends on Saturday night, went to a birthday party on Sunday and then a dinner party at Jake's that evening. What fun! We had 8 people total, had a great homemade meal and played the longest simplest board game I have ever seen... Citadels. I swear, 95% of the game is waiting for the next person to go. After 3 hours, people started to leave and I realized I didn't get anything accomplished this weekend.

Last night's party at Delmonico's was a blast. We were seated at this giant table and ordered our meals and quickly went into a Secret Elf game. You choose a present and then the next person gets to choose one or steal someone's present. The five youngins in the office (the four shown in the post from yesterday and I) all purchased pretty universal popular gifts (gift cards and the DVD I bought) and the rest of them purchased pretty... unique gifts. I first opened a holiday tablecloth, but that was quickly stolen from me. OK. Then I opened a safe one.. a gift card.. but then that was stolen from me and traded with a candle holder thing. Hmpth. Then my boss stole THAT from me and gave me a bag of chocolate things. I ended up leaving with that. At least it wasn't the tablecloth. ;)

But the meal made me ill and I waddled around for the rest of the night having stomach issues and feeling light headed. I don't think I should have eaten the entire dish.. (which was great, by the way).

Holiday partying with the coworkers

Mike and Katie
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Emily & JB
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We're at Delmonicos Italian Steakhouse celebrating the holidays right now. Making small talk, exchanging gifts (I had a nice gift card until it was stolen and replaced with a bag of chocolate?). At least the food was nice! How's the mood lighting?

The evil bunny Frank

The evil bunny Frank
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Poor Deb. This hare has plagued her since May. I was trying out the bluetooth she lent me and spotted this bugger out the window.

New phone, new excitement

New phone! LG VX8600 to be the most exact. And no, it's not the RAZR or KRAZR, it's its competitor and it's a MUCH better phone. I started looking at phones last week (during the conference) and my old phone had started to give me trouble recharging and connecting to the internet. Checking out Verizon's website led me to find out I could get this $200 phone for next to nothing and upgrade my plan for no extra cost.

And the phone has soooo many cool features. I've always wanted bluetooth. I'm one of those techno geeks that loves playing with useless crud, but this is so useful. Not only does the phone have a standard camera, but it takes videos, has a slot for an SD card (coming soon), does bluetooth, plays MP3's wirelessly, has a HUGE screen and has the BEST voice dialing I have ever seen. I say "Call Laura" and it does it without my programming. I say "Call 555-0771" fast and it verifies and calls. How sweet is that?



But it's not all fun and games. I've had to manually recover a lot of my phone numbers from the old phone. Like I said it stopped charging, and yes, it decided to die the day I got the new phone (Friday). So I can turn it on for 25 seconds every 6 hours and write down 3-4 numbers before its dead again. I think I've got everyone important (save for Remi) but I guess I'll survive without the remaining folks. And Deb gave me a bluetooth headset (which my brother is getting me a great one for the holidays) to try out and its really nifty. I can be 30 feet away from my phone and still talk as if I was connected.

I have several items for the phone on my wishlist now, all of which have been scooped up by my family. They have tough times buying for me, and were grateful I found something to finally need. So once I get the new microSD card, wireless stereo headsets (for music at the gym), USB computer bluetooth adapter for the internet, and the bluetooth earpiece from Aaron, I think I'll be in cell phone bliss.

And now with all these fun features, I'm gonna see about connecting my cell to my blog so pictures I take can be auto-posted as entries to this here page. How sweet is that? I take something cool and poof, it's posted.

Almost to the end...

The conference ended and I had a great time. The last night we were there, all the fun people got together and got pretty smashed over the course of three hours. A lot of the same silliness that happened back in February repeated itself this night. We had a lot of laughs over a wide range of topics. And funnily enough, several other people agreed with me on Kelly Rippa's attitude. Ha.

I fell asleep during one of the sessions on Thurdays. Which was hilarious, but expected. So dark.. so boring (at times) and I was tired from waking up early and partying too late. When Shelly scooted around me to get to her chair she had to do some kind of mambo thing which set Greg off to bellow. He made a joke later about not waking the monster.. not waking the maniac... but somehow that turned into "Don't wake a kleptomaniac." That stuck with me for another day. And they didn't even know about the 14 bottles of water I took from the hotel. Ha!

But I made several friends.. and had a ton of fun. Not once did I want to leave and go home... like I usually do on almost every vacation or time away from home. My return trip home Friday was nauseating, but that might be because my driver drove insanely and took risks with my life. "You don't drive, do you?" he asks after I gasped twice. Uhh.. yes, I drive, you moron... and I know enough not to pass TWO cars on a double line. Yikes. I skated through security, my flight was about an hour and I was back on the ground and in my car about 4 hours after I left the hotel. Not so bad at all.

Living it up, Ohio style

I've had a busy couple of days, and not much sleep unfortunately. I specifically had my final exam moved to Monday so I could study throughout the weekend, but if you know me well enough, I don't study, so I put it off until the last minute. I found any excuse to do something else, whether it be shopping on Saturday, watching 5 movies back to back, or brunching and Target(ing) with Deb on Sunday. Even Sunday night, a prime time for studying, I found something else to do by cooking a meal and having some kind of family night at my place. But I did study a little, and made my 2 page cheat sheet which was very useful on the exam.

And I took it an hour or so before my flight left for Cincinnati. I must be insane or something. And I didn't pack until the last minute. But the flight was good, delayed, but good, and I didn't get into Ohio until 8:30ish and on the road until 9ish. My driver was very accommodating and I forced carsickness on myself by logging into an online meeting in the back of the limo.

Last February, as you may recall, I had a great time at this conference. Large room, good food, great people. And a lot of that has reiterated itself.. except my room is about 1/3 the size as before and the material we're learning much more difficult. But several people that attended the February conference are here again this week, so it's sort of a reunion. In a good way. Okay, we're about to start some lessons.

Photo by dmolsen

Been busy and getting ready to leave...

I have been busy.. always busy. End of classes.. lots of homework, projects, papers, presentations. All this week I will be in Cincinnati, Ohio for a work conference. I have an exam Monday at 11:30 and then I leave shortly thereafter. Too much to get done before I leave, but it will get done. When will I sleep? I'll blog more about my travels, since I'll have more time.