Baseball Season - Week 4 Wrap-up

Week 4 featured a single game on Monday night, before spring break kicked in. We played the Iron Birds, and it was the first game featuring kid-pitch in the 4th, 5th and 6th innings.

It was a close fought game, with the Raptors taking an early lead. At the end of the 3rd inning, we were up 5-3. After the 3rd inning, the pitching machine came off and the kids took the mound. In the 4th inning, my son took the mound and gave up 1 hit, hit one batter, struck out three, and gave up no runs. Things were looking fairly good so far.

The tide turned in the 5th inning with our next pitcher, when the Iron Birds struck for 3 runs, going up 6-5. We were not able to pick up any more runs, and hence lost our first game taking us to a 6-1 record. Despite a lackluster offensive performance (which is to be expected in the transition from pitching machine to kid pitch), it was a good defensive game and a decent premier of our three rookie Raptors pitchers.

Our score sheet for the game is found below.

Tallships in Oceanside Harbor

In mid-January, I learned that two tallships would sail into Oceanside Harbor and provide tours for folks who wanted to look at the ships. So, I took off from work after a half-day, and brought the whole family down to the harbor.


We walked out to the end of the North jetty, and watched the two ships make their way into the harbor. The first ship fired off a canon as it entered the jetty - thankfully, their aim was horrible!


After both ships had docked, tours were provided by the crew of each ship, which actually live aboard the ships. The quarters appeared to be quite cramped, and the lack of personal space would take some getting used to, I imagine.

We went with our friends, and all the kids had a great time - I think they may have even learned a thing or two! Below, Peter and his buddy Andy take a quick break aboard the Hawaiian Chieftain.

Baseball Season - Week 3 Wrap-up

Week 3 has come and gone, and the Raptors are still undefeated with a record of 6 wins and 0 losses. Monday night's game against the Storm was a test of our patience as the opposing coach went extremely slow the entire game, limiting us to four innings of play rather than the usual six. He also appropriated two additional outs through extremely questionable calls/decisions, and we gave him an additional at bat later in the game as well. We managed to come through that game with an 8-6 win, so we chalked it up to experience.

Our Saturday game found us facing the Bulls again, now having faced each team in the division at least once. It was a beautiful day out (as may be deduced by the photo above), and the Raptors had another great game. The final score was 23-5, and featured a veritable barrage of offense from the Raptors. My son went 5 for 5, with 2 singles, 2 doubles, a triple, 2 runs scored and 4 RBIs. Every player had a hit, and our defense was fairly solid as well.

With the end of game #6, we now prepare for kid-pitching. The next five games will be three innings of pitching machine, with the remaining three innings kid pitch. The final third of the season will say "adios!" to the pitching machine, with all innings now pitched by kids. Good pitching really dominates at this level, so it will be interesting to see how our team fares. It's my goal to get as many of the kids on the mound as possible for experience. Right now, I'm looking at pitching six out of the ten players on the team, so it should be interesting!

Score cards for games #5 and #6 are below.

Friday Afternoon Surf Report

I decided to hit the waves today on my lunch, even though we did get a very small amount of rain last night. My body desperately needed some water time, and I reasoned that not enough rain fell to actually flush the bad stuff from the storm drains into the ocean.

What a beautiful day it is! The waves were chest high, with a light onshore wind putting a bit of texture on the surface. My lack of surfing in the recent weeks made itself known by the fatigue in my shoulders and triceps as I tried to get back outside after catching my first wave. I felt like a newborn struggling to move across the floor as wave after wave of the set pummeled me. Leave it to me to take the first wave of a set...

I finally made it back outside with my arms burning and doing their best impersonation of linguini. I caught several more waves, all of them lefts that had a bit of juice to them and plenty of time to ride. At the end of my lunch, I was exhausted but had that "post surf glow". Nice way to finish off the work week!

Qcodo

In my random internet wandering today, I stumbled upon a fairly slick PHP Development Framework called Qcodo. One of the things I dislike the most about PHP is the tendency to mix in PHP code with the HTML. This can make maintenance of the site fairly messy, and breaks the mantra of separating the data and implementation from the presentation.

Qcodo is a framework built from the ground up to address this issue. It works from a base data model (e.g. database schema) and builds up objects which map to this data model. It features some pretty slick code creation that also creates default HTML forms for adding, editing, listing and deleting this data as well. Toss in some AJAX functionality for good measure, and you have yourself one heck of a package.

About the only negative points I can see right now are the following:

1. It is still in the beta stage, so if you decide to give it a whirl, expect some issues and future changes.
2. It requires PHP 5 and MySQL. If you only have PHP version 4 installed, it is a show stopper. The developers of Qcodo are working on database adapters to support DBs other than MySQL (such as PostgreSQL), so this particular issue may fall by the wayside in a future release.
   

I'd recommend you visit the Qcodo website and take some time and look through the screencasts they provide - it is very impressive.

Baseball Season - Week 2 Wrap-up

The VALL AA Raptors began the week 2-0, and ended the week 4-0! We have played all of the teams in our division, except for one (which we face off against tonight). The boys are really getting used to the pitching machine, and we are seeing fewer strike outs with each game. The defense is getting better slowly, but it is something we will be focusing on during our next practice

Game #3 was played Tuesday night under gorgeous conditions against the River Cats. We had a heck of an offensive and defensive performance, shutting them out 20-0. Le' ouch. I felt bad that the other team didn't score any runs, however I can't tell my players to not try and make plays.

Game #4 was Saturday morning at 10:00 AM, and we found ourselves opposing the River dogs. I know the manager and one coach of the River Dogs very well, as both had kids on my T-ball team 2 years ago, and the manager's son and my son have played on the same soccer team for several years. Anyhow, the game featured good offense from our team, with lackluster defense. The final score was Riverdogs 7, Raptors 16.

We should be starting kid-pitch sometime in the very near future. At that point in the season, things can change drastically. If you have a couple of players that can throw the ball over the plate, then you should do well. We'll see what shakes out over the next couple of weeks.

Score cards for both games are here:

Baseball Season - Week 1 Wrap-up

I am managing my son's Little League team again this year, and we (the team and I) are having a very good time. The AA Raptors have just completed our first week of games (2 games per week barring any rain outs), and are now 2-0.

The team saw the return of 5 kids from last year's team, along with 5 new recruits. So far, the kids seem to really have a good understanding of the game and have made some tremendous plays for it being so early in the season. I don't know if I am coaching a more effectively than last year (I am sure that I am coaching differently, as I constantly learn as well), or if it is that the kids are just now more capable when it comes to understanding the game. Whatever it is, they are having a great time and I am enjoying watching them play ball.

Game #1 was played Monday evening, without the benefit of a pitching machine. The three legs which form a support tripod for the machinery was missing, so it fell to the managers / coaches to pitch to their own teams. The final score was 19-13 through 6 innings. I figured that I threw about 125 pitches and finished with an ERA of of 28.5! Man, was my shoulder sore the next day. Our lead off batter went 5 for 5, hitting for the cycle. Defensively, we also turned a double play (pop out to P, man on 1st ran to 2nd without tagging up, put-out at first).

Game #2 was played Saturday afternoon, with the pitching machine present and accounted for. I was a bit worried how the kids would deal with the pitching machine, so earlier that day we went to the batting cages and hit off machines for an hour. I think that helped them out greatly, as none of the boy appeared hesitant during their at bats. Winning by a score of 6-19, our defense was again very solid. Offensively, we had 7 more hits than the first game, and 4 fewer strike-outs.

If you click on the thumbnails of the game's scorecards, you can see a larger version of them. I use the Situational Scorekeeping method, which is somewhat different than the dated, standard method.

Guitar Hero and Me

We bought the kids a PS2 for Christmas, and bought two new games that don't involve just sitting on your arse all date long: Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) Supernova and Guitar Hero. I bought DDR plus two dance pads for my wife and daughter, whereas Guitar Hero and the axe that comes with it was for my middle son and I (really).

DDR is fun, and a good work out as well. However, this post is not about DDR. No - this post is an ode to Guitar Hero (GH), one of the best games I've played in quite a while. At it's base, GH is a rhythm game, where you press down 'frets' and strum as the game directs you. The music is divied up into sections which advance in complexity, starting with "Opening Licks" and progressing in difficulty until you get up to the final the "Face Melters".

The selection of songs is outstanding, and each is performed not by the original artists, but it is difficult to tell. Another bonus:I've been exposed to a lot of music which I never heard before, and like most of it. I have now almost completed the game at Medium difficulty, and will probably make the leap to the next level sometime in the near future.

The neat thing is that this has caused me to pull out my Fender Stratocaster and clean it up and play with it a bit. My son is fascinated with it, so maybe I'll try and practice a bit with it. It's been a longgggg time since I last practiced, so it isn't going to be pretty. I'd take lessons if they were'nt so damn expensive...

Anyhow, if you get a chance to play it, give it a shot. I bet you'll enjoy it if you like rock music.

What I've Been Reading

For my birthday and Christmas, I received several books that I've been going through. I just finished Robert Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land. It is my understanding that this is commonly viewed as one of the best Science Fiction books ever written, however I just can't share that opinion.

The first third of the book was interesting, and kept me reading. The remaining 2/3's of the book were a bit more laborious and uninspiring. I don't know why, but I find stories about uber-people who are nigh invulnerable and so much better than everyone at everything to be rather boring. I had the same problem with Frank Herbert's Dune. Some of the ideas in Heinlein's classic are interesting to mull over, however the story just didn't grab me and pull me in.

On the other hand, Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald, is a fantastic short story filled with flavor and character. If you like your Cthulhu mythos blended with a Victorian setting and spiced with a dash of famous literary characters, then you won't be disappointed. The layout of the story, done as a newspaper complete with advertisements, is splendid. At 9 pages, it would be criminal and rather lethargic of you to not read it.

So, what do I have next in the lineup to read? Some old school Greyhawk fiction that escaped my notice when I was younger...

Update on my Nervous Dog

This is a follow-up post to the a previous installment, so read that first if you don't know what I'm talking about...

We talked to our vet (which is located in a large chain of pet stores), and ever since they were bought out a couple of years ago, things have gone down hill. To write a prescription, they want to charge us $13 for each. Ug.

My wife has a friend who is a vet-tech and lives in Colorado. On Friday, she talked with her for the first time in quite a while, and mentioned Ace's problem. She suggested we try giving him one Benedryl tablet, as that will sometimes calm dogs down enough so that they can sleep. Of course, it also might have the opposite reaction, so be ready.

On Sunday evening, the rain started to come down and Ace got real skittish. Figuring that there was no better time than the present, I gave him a generic Benedryl, and he slept like a champ until 6:30 in the morning. No worries, no problems! ;>

DSPAM Installed

At work, we have a Debian Linux box that serves as our mail and web server. Recently, I upgraded that box from Debian Woody to Sarge. After that upgrade was complete, I decided to try and improve upon the spam filtering implementation.

The mail server runs qmail as the SMTP server, and I have the mail delivered to local users via procmail. Using procmail allows me to do all kinds of neat filtering on the server side. As an example, I automatically place mailing list traffic into separate IMAP folders. Similarly, mail from customer domains is automatically placed in their own company specific IMAP folders, thereby organizing my incoming emails automatically.

One of the filters that I had incoming mail going through was SpamAssassin. When I first installed SpamAssassin 2+ years ago, it did a very good job of detecting and flagging spam. However, the spammers have gotten rather sophisticated over the last two years, and many of them now actually test their spam against SpamAssassin to try and thwart it. While SpamAssassin was still able to detect and flag an ample amount of spam, more and more seemed to slip through as the months went by.

I decided to try out DSPAM after hearing good reports on its performance from a friend, and reading about it on its website. It wasn't available in the Debian repository, so I downloaded the source tarball and then built and installed it.

DSPAM works best if you have a corpus of spam and non-spam (or ham) to train it. If you do not have a good selection (in the thousands), then I would recommend not using it until you do. Once you train DSPAM with emails that are good and bad, then you can put it to work effectively.

DSPAM is not a fire and forget type of spam fighting solution. It requires a certain amount of vigilance on the part of the user to correct falsely flagged spam or ham. I set up three folders in each user's IMAP folder hierarchy for this purpose:

1. Spam/ - This is the folder where DSPAM sends all emails it detects as spam.
2. Spam/Missed/ - This folder is where users place emails which DSPAM did not detect as spam, but should have.
3. Spam/NotSpam/ - This folder is where emails are placed which were detected as spam, but are not.

Every night, cron executes a bash script I wrote which crawls through the Missed/ and NotSpam/ directories, correcting DSPAM's mistakes.

So, how is it working? After about 3 weeks of use, my accuracy rate is up to over 95%, and that is with out as much initial training as I recommended. I expect that over the course of the next month or two that I will be able to get that accuracy up to the triple 9's range - 99.9%.

Over all, I am extremely happy with DSPAM's performance. It is a bit trickier to install and get going, but once it is humming along nicely, it purrs.

My Dog + Rain = Sleep Deprivation

Our dog, Ace, is now 11+ years old. My wife and I picked him out of a litter of puppies from the San Diego County Animal Shelter, located in Carlsbad. As it turns out, he was the lucky one of the litter, as the others were put down due to illness the Monday after we adopted him. He had is share of health problems when he was young, but he bounced back nicely and he's been with us ever since.

He is a big dog. At around 115 lbs and tall enough to pick stuff off the dinner table, it is challenging keeping food away from this mutt. We had to put a lock on the pantry because he knows how to open up doors and took to browsing through the pantry and devouring a box of cereal or loaf of bread. To say that our dog is food-motivated would be an understatement.

Ace is part chocolate lab and part great dane. We did not know about the great dane portion of his heritage until it became obvious as he grew. About one year after we adopted Ace, our first child was born. 3 kids later, and Ace has been pretty good with all of them although he is a bit grouchier now than he was when he was a puppy.

I'm not sure how old Ace will get - he's got some serious gray around the muzzle, many fatty tumors on his back, chest, legs, etc., and he's definitely not as nimble or energetic as he used to be. From what I understand, the average great danes life expectancy is under 10 years. Since Ace is a mixed breed, I imagine that he is expected to supersede that number.

So, what has this got to do with the title of the post? Well, the last year or so has seen Ace change his behavior under certain circumstances. Now, whenever it rains, he gets extremely scared. He will come upstairs when the rain starts and start knocking stuff down, making a huge racket. He will go into the bathroom and use his nose to life up the toilet seat and then let it come crashing down. When you try and comfort him, you can feel his whole body shaking. When this occurs at night, well now you know where the sleep deprivation fits in.

We talked to the veterinarian, and he gave us two pills to test out. This medication is called Clomicalm, and cost us $6 a pill! Gah! Doing a little detective work, I have found that a generic is available online, which would be significantly less expensive. Let's hope that our vet is willing to prescribe the generic and fax Ace's prescriptions to the online pharmacist - otherwise we are pretty screwed.

If any of you have any other suggestions, I am willing and ready to listen!

Yet Another Reason to Not Upgrade to Vista

I've pretty much avoided discussing Windows Vista on this blog as I really haven't found many interesting tidbits about this new OS. I am of the general opinion that Vista is an XP "point" upgrade - like XP.5, or something like that. It isn't adding features with which I am particularly impressed.

High on my list of annoyances are the many different flavors of Vista available (5, I think), and the lack of a clear message detailing what you get (or don't get) with each version. I can see many people looking at the various flavors and saying, "WTF?".

Much of Vista's marketing push seems to focus on the user interface enhancements made to the system. Of course, to make optimal use of these new enhancements, Microsoft recommends a computer with a pretty hefty set of requirements - a list which many non-gaming PCs will fail to meet. So, you could run Vista in a "degraded" mode where many of the UI changes are not present... and end up with a product similar to XP.

Microsoft has also made a fairly draconian change in the usage of the upgrade editions of the new OS. In the past, upgrade editions could either be upgraded over an older version of Windows, or you could do a fresh install on a blank hard drive. This came in handy, as it was common practice for some to reinstall Windows annually to clear out all the cruft that accumulated. Also, it is essential to do a clean install when a system has been infected with a rootkit and/or many viruses.

To reinstall a Vista upgrade edition OS, you will first need to install an older version of Windows, and then do the upgrade all over again. Either that, or you could bend over and fork out a good chunk of change for the "Full" Vista (insert flavor here) Edition.

If you have XP, then I'd recommend not upgrading to Vista. The extra hardware costs needed to receive the full benefits of Vista plus the hose job Microsoft is handing out for their "Upgrade Edition" are just too much to swallow. Stick with XP on those Windows boxes you need, and maybe look at trying out a Linux distribution like Ubuntu for others.

If you need to get Vista, I'd look at buying a new PC and getting it bundled with the system. For the full retail price, you might as well get a system that works well with it at the same time.

Firebug: Debugging Web Development

If you do any kind of web development, then you are familiar with how difficult it can be to figure out how a complex web page has gone wrong. When you add in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), another layer of complexity is added, compounding the difficulty. Finally, if you are jumping onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon and looking to add Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) into the mix, then things can get downright unpleasant.

So, what is the harried web developer to do? Who or what will come to the aid of our intrepid master of all things www?


Firebug to the rescue! Firebug is a Firefox extension which does so many tasks so well, that it is difficult to summarize them in this short blog post. However, I'll do my best to highlight a few.

Firebug lets you explore the structure of any web page in a variety of ways. When Firebug is active, it resides in a window at the bottom of your web page. Alternatively, it can appear in a separate window, although I like the integration with the page I am viewing. Combine this with tabbed browsing and you have separate Firebug windows for each tab.

In HTML mode, Firebug displays the source code of the current page, initially folder for a good overhead view. When you put your mouse cursor over an element in the HTML display, the portion of the web page to which it corresponds is highlighted. There is also functionality to revers this process: hit the 'Inspect' button on firebug, move your mouse over a portion of the web page you are intereted in, and the HTML view will move to that part of the source.

The HTML display is updated in real time as well. As I am typing in this post, I have Firebug open and see it add my text to the web page as I type. The HTML display allows you to edit the source in place as well. This sentence was typed in the Firebug HTML view...

When you select an HTML element in Firebug, another sub-window displays the CSS properties of that element. Now, you will know exactly why an element looks the way it does, and from which CSS rule the look and feel descended. It has a very nice visual representation of the CSS box model for each element, cleanly conveying the offset, margin, border, padding, and size of the element.

There are so many other features to describe: a javascript console, a windows to monitor and time network requests, DOM functionality, and more. The latest issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (February 2007) has a nice article on Firebug, which is available online. After reading through that article, go download and experiment with Firebug - I bet that it will become an essential tool for your web development needs!

Upgrading from Debian Woody to Sarge

At work, I use Debian linux as the distribution of choice for our file and mail/web servers. In my experience, the stable branch of the the Debian distribution has been very, very stable. When it comes to file and mail servers, that is exactly what I am aiming at - stability!

Each Debain stable release has a code name based upon (so far) one of the characters in Pixar's Toy Story. The current release is Sarge, the previous release was Woody, and the upcoming release is Etch. Sarge has been out for quite a while, with security updates continuing for Woody up and until the first of the new year.

I upgraded our file server from Woody to Sarge sometime last year, and experienced no problems. I was a bit more concerned with our mail/web server, as it serves important public facing functions for my company.

With solid backups prepared and a bit of trepidation in my heart, I began updating the mail and web server. I followed the directions published in the release notes, and experienced only a few minor hiccups along the way.

After about 200MB of downloaded updates and a bit of intervention from me, the system was ready to go. Email worked fine, as did our web server. All in all, a relatively painless upgrade path!

The next release of Debian is due sometime in the near future. However, right now everything seems to be working just fine, so I'm betting that Debian Sarge stays on these servers for the next year or so.

New Year's Eve

Yes, I'm back from vacation and slowly getting back into the rhythm of actually having to work for a living. As I spent those two weeks away from work, I constantly found myself thinking, "I could really get used to this not working thing." Too bad the "no money" thing is more of an issue...

My wonderful wife gave me two tickets for the last regular season game of my San Diego Chargers. It happened to fall on New Year's Eve, so my mom and dad watched the kids while the two of us headed out for a rare day together.



We made it down to the stadium by 10:30, and met up with two of my nephews, my brother-in-law, and a few of his work associates to tailgate before the game. All of us were wearing our Charger jerseys, as one would expect!

We parked outside of the stadium and walked on it ($20 parking fee for stadium parking - le ouch!) as it was a nice day, and we parked close to a nice exit route to avoid stadium traffic when the game ended.

The seats we had were up in the View (aka Nose Bleed) level, but I was surprised that I really enjoyed watching the game from there. It was very easy to see plays develop, holes form in the line, and receivers break free from coverage. The only complaint I had with the seats was that we were in the sun the entire time. If I had brought a hat, it would have been fine.


The Chargers won the game, even though they pulled Rivers and Tomlinson out for the last part of the third and all of the fourth quarter. The Cardinals made a game of it at the end, however the home team prevailed and sixty thousand plus fans went home happy, as did we.


After the game, we picked up our children and headed home. There, we let the kids stay up until 9 o'clock to watch the ball drop in Time Square. After getting the kids to bed (party animals that we are), we shortly crashed thereafter. Happy new year!

Merry Christmas!

I just wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, with high hopes for a prosperous new year! I'm taking a couple (much needed) weeks off from work to spend time with the family, surf a bit, and decompress. See you in 2007!

Fun with Virtualization

No, I'm not talking about some aspect of the Matrix, or anything influenced by William Gibson. A few weeks ago, I installed the vmware server on my Ubuntu Linux box to see what was possible. Installation was painless, as vmware is available from the repositories. Thus, installation was only a simple `apt-get' away.

What does vmware allow you to do? In simple terms, it allows you to host one or more different operating systems (OS) while running the host OS. In my case, the host OS is Ubuntu Linux, but it could be Windows system as well. To download the vmware server, visit this page.

Once you install the virtual server software, the next thing to do is to decide exactly what you'd like to run. I decided that creating a Windows XP virtual machine (VM) would be a good first step. To do so, you specify a few options including what type of network interface the virtual machine will use (I chose to give the virtual machine its own specific ip address), hardware availability, and the size of the virtual machine's hard drive.

Once this is done, slip your Windows XP installation media in the CD-ROM drive and `boot' the virtual machine. If you haven't screwed up anything too badly, installation of the OS should proceed as normal.

I then went on to install Apache on the XP VM, and setup an ISAPI application which is normally deployed on IIS to see how it would perform. Everything worked as expected, and the performance of both systems was pretty respectable. My linux box only has 1 gigabyte of RAM, and I think that another gigabyte would be most helpful if I were to leave the VM up and running full time.

Once you are done working with your VM, you can suspend it (like hibernating a laptop) and when you restart the VM next, everything will be as you left it. Pretty slick!

So, what are practical applications for vmware? As in my example above, I could see people installing a VM of a different OS on a host OS to get functionality not currently available without installing another box.

Also, since the VMs are simple files in the filesystem, it makes backups and restores trivial. The VM sees identical hardware, no matter what actual hardware is used in the host OS. Thus, if one server goes down, simply copy a backup VM to another machine, and you would be up and running in no time.

Testing is another area where I can see VMs playing a prominent role. Instead of having 5+ boxes that take up a lot of space, energy costs, and maintenance, you instead have one sysem which hosts the other test environments. Start up one VM, test, and shut it down. Move to the next VM, etc.

Finally, there are already many vmware appliances available. Examples include a Windows 2003 server trial edition, various linux distributions, mail server suites, LAMP stacks, etc. It makes trying a new linux distro trivial, which is another bonus.

Are any of you using them in innovative ways?

Back in the Water Again

For the first time in over four weeks, I went surfing today. My dry dock period began when I injured my left knee at soccer practice. I zigged one way without wearing cleats, and my foot zagged the other way on the wet grass - not good. Note to self: wear cleats, dummy.

I was pretty gimpy for a week, and was feeling almost 100% by the end of the second week. Since the surf was pathetic, I decided to do a bit of jogging to strengthen my legs and knees for the next week and a half. A bit of cardiovascular work always gets the blood pumping (ba-da-bing!).

We had a good amount of rain over the weekend, so it is always a good idea to wait 72 hours for the bacteria washed out of the storm drains to clear up. So, out I went today, completely out paddling shape for the good sized surf we've had since the storm.

Frankly, I was just glad to make it out and into the lineup. My arms had the strength of an over-cooked spaghetti noodle, and it was difficult trying to get my timing back to where it needs to be to catch a wave of decent size. So, let's hope this size holds out as I get back into surf-shape.

Of Turkeys and Birthdays

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and with it the four day weekend. Coming into work the Monday before Thanksgiving is always a relatively joyous (compared to other Mondays), as it dawns on you that this week you will work three days, and then get four off. Ah yes, if only every week was like that...

As usual, we had Thanksgiving lunch at our house for my wife's side of the family on Thursday. We fried the turkey (as usual), and everything tasted great. It was a relaxing afternoon spent with family, lubricated by good beer (Karl Strauss and Samuel Adams), good company, and good food. After the meal and before dessert, the group went down to a local park and kicked around a soccer ball, let the kids go wild on the play structure, and burn some calories off before refueling with sugar based treats.

The next day, Friday, found us at my mom and dad's house celebrating Thanksgiving with my side of the family. Yes, turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, rolls, etc. take 2! We had a good time visiting, and the kids (and yes, even the adults) enjoyed a bit of slot-car competitive racing. My father decided to pull down some of our old slot car track and mount two different circuits on a fairly large sheet of plywood. After a bunch of decoration (complete with sponsor signs featuring standard racing sponsors as well as family related businesses), the Krause Speedway was born. When I bring it home, I'll make sure to snap several pictures of it and post it here.

If Thanksgiving is here, then my birthday must be hiding around somewhere as well. As is tradition, we celebrate my birthday with turkey day (which I have been assured does not imply that I am, in fact, a turkey). As far as gifts are concerned, I received many cool things from my family: a new LGB steam locomotive and tender (Union Pacific 2-4-0 pictured below) that features lights, smoke, and sound, which looks particularly handsome around the Christmas tree; a powder blue Chargers jersey featuring #21; an away jersey for the English world cup soccer team; the movie Heat; and a few other treats.

On Saturday we got all of the Christmas stuff out and set up, including the lights on the house. I finished the train last night, and so now all we need to worry about is doing our shopping...

Here's hoping that you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday as well!