Our weekend was full of excitement. I flew out of work Friday evening, got home, made dinner for the kids, then shipped them off to our friend’s in Hudson. Erica and I went to the MANN holiday dinner at Coral Seafood. It was a very nice event, but as usual the DJ and dancing overpowers any sense of being able to have a conversation.

On Saturday I packed, then we went off to the MANN kid’s party. This was pretty low key this year, which was very nice. Plenty of kids and crafts and music, but not completely crazy with the hair being pulled out and getting stuffed with cookies. We left right from there and drove three hours to my parents place in NY.

We had a delicious dinner, saw some more relatives for dessert - then tried to get the kids to bed. The kids were full of sugar, and had slept the whole way in the car, so they didn’t exactly want to sleep. Our son fell asleep around 11, woke up at 1, was back asleep who knows when and woke up again around 6.

We had some breakfast and farted around. Then around 11 we left to “go to the park.” We had a little detour and ended up at my Mom’s surprise birthday party! Whoo hoo! We gave my mom some “big pictures” - 20×30in. framed prints (check out El-Co Color Labs). She already hung them up in her apartment.

More family and friends (and food), then a little more visiting and a 3 hour ride home.

After getting home I installed my new DVD burner (Lite-On 18x DL from newegg, $40 including shipping) in my ubuntu rig, and attempted to setup DVD decrypter and DVD shrink in wine. DVD shrink worked for a while, but then completely locked up the whole machine (this has only ever happened when running win apps in wine, specifically photoshop). It took out the master boot record, so I spent the next 40 minutes controlling my heart attack and trying to figure out how to recover. I managed to boot off the Ubuntu live CD and restore the GRUB loader - everything back to normal, phew! I would say this has advanced my rank from “newbie” to “novice.”

This weekend was great, a little difficult to stay with my cleansing, but overall I did good. I stayed away from chocolate (except the cake my mother made) and coffee and controlled my meal eating. I still feel good, and am back on plan for only one more week! Whoo hoo!

My family and I went to Martha’s Vineyard with some really awesome friends for the Thanksgiving weekend. It was a great adventure, except that I had to work on Friday, and Erica caught strep throat.

We drove down Wednesday afternoon, parked the car, took the bus, then the ferry, then the minivan, then a nap, then some coffee. Erica brought ingredients for her awesome spinach lasagna, and Ted brought a lasagna that he had frozen - so dinner was delicious - so was the coffee.

On Thursday the crew worked all day preparing the turkey and all the fixins. The turkey spent most of the day in the oven, then moved out to the grill - it was awesometastic. After dinner and dessert and all-day coffee, they drove me back to the ferry. I took the last ferry, back on the bus to my car, two hours of driving, three hours of sleeping, then to work at 5AM.

By noon Friday we had made over $76M with no site failures of any kind, so by 1PM it was safe to leave. Another two hour drive, then a bus and a ferry and a minivan and some coffee. Back on the island by 4:30PM. And then some coffee.

On Saturday we had some coffee, and a couple really nice walks. We got out to the beach, which was amazingly pleasant for a late-November day. On Sunday we had coffee, then packed up. Somewhere along the line Erica caught a nice case of strep throat, so, we had some coffee. Then got in the car, on the ferry, in a bus, back to our car, and a two hour trip home. I took off Monday and Tuesday to take care of her and the kids.

So, now, how about the coffee? Oh, and the food?

Things started to get bad when Halloween hit, but now combine that with Thanksgiving and you have a disaster. For the past month I’ve been overeating all kinds of bad stuff. I managed to gain about 7 pounds - bringing me up to one pound under my goal weight (okay, so I shouldn’t complain). I’m at 154 now. I’ve also completely overdone it with coffee. I started to get to the point that coffee wouldn’t wake me up anymore, and only helped get rid of the headaches.

So, starting this past Monday, I started a 21 day cleanup routine. I’ve dropped coffee and soda - replaced it with a little green tea when I really need it. I’ve also gotten back on plan with eating. I’m not counting points, but just using the common sense I learned from losing 50 pounds. I’m also upping my exercise to daily, alternating biking/weights with biking/abs. I’ll keep you all updated on my progress to cleandome.

So, between watching Donnie Darko and Heroes I think I’ve got this whole time travel thing figured out. One can create time, or at least the illusion of time, by simply not sleeping.

Let’s see, after work yesterday around 5pm I went home, put more memory in my Ubuntu, then went to church for some churchy pizza, beer and spiritual parenting. The class was happy and good, and we of course stayed after for the chatting and stuff. Then we went home, and of course the kids don’t fall asleep in the car anymore, so we had to put them to bed. I think I finished that around 11:30pm.

I went down to the basement and did a shorty exercise routine - 20 mins on the bike, 1 set of weights. Went upstairs brewed some coffee, put it in my thermos and headed of to work around 12:15am.

I drank the coffee.

I worked from 1am to 3:30am, then headed home. There was no way I was going to sleep. So, I installed windows xp inside a vmware virtual machine in my Ubuntu. Then I installed office, mainly so I could get the two apps running that I can’t get running in Ubuntu, publisher and access. I don’t much like them programs, but I still need to be able to open the publisher files and the openoffice database can import tables from access, but not the queries or the forms and the stuff. Wow, I’m out of it - does it show?

So, I headed to bed around 5:30am.

Then I done woked up at 7, tooked a shower, and then I woked up at 7 and … uh, I woke up, then I made some shower and a breakfast and woke up the childs and. Did I mention that yesterday between work and churchy I dropped of a roll of film at the 1 hour film development at the CVS? So, this morning after the waking up and stuff, I went to drive my daughter to school, we stopped at CVS to pick up our 1 hour prints. I was told that I had filled out the wrong envelope, and should have filled out the identally looking 1 hour envelope, and that my film was in the pile to be sent out to a lab. Thankfully it was still in the pile, so we took it out and put it in the 1 hour pile - so, I’m giving them another 8 hours or so to pick up my photocd and prints. This is why I don’t do the film.

Ok, then we started the drive to school - taking the backroads as usual to avoid traffic. But, there was a big accident, so the odds had switched, and my commute time trippled, and thinking I had left early - ended up arriving 20 mins late.

We listened to some from the top podcasts in the car - and there was this one with these two 12 year old piano playing boys. The music was fantastic, but the interview even better. One of the boys said the best invention ever was food. The announcer bunny said the best invention ever was the thermos. I agree. He said that it keeps the cold things cold and the hot things hot, how does it know the difference? Fantastic.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my daughter fell in love with the blue dress barbie at the CVS, and I had to tell her that she can ask Santa for it and she can’t have it now. She cried because she said that someone else might buy it in the meantime, so I had to tell her the truth about Santa:

Santa and his elves have their own factory, and can make any toy in the world. Mommies and Daddies and Grandmas and Grandpas have to buy toys in the regular stores made in regular factories, and sometimes they run out of the right toys and it is very hectic especially the day after Thanksgiving. But Santa doesn’t have to worry about that, because he can custom fabricate anything.

My daughter had some other concerns though. She wanted to know how Santa knew which house was hers and how would he deliver the blue dress barbie to the right place. I had to explain, that when I was a kid, this was a serious issue, and lots of mistakes were made. Everything was done manually, not very efficient. But, in recent years, Santa and his elves have completely modernized. They have integrated systems for tracking kids, houses, etc. He gets updated data on his cell phone, which integrates with the sleighs GPS system. He knows who’s been naughty, whos been nice, how much time you’ve spent watching TV, using the internet, he also knows if you are at your house or at grandma’s, and delivers everything to the right place. He’s got bar code scanners and RFID tags to track the exact position of all presents at all times, it is really quite cool.

I’m going to go get some more coffee. It is 9:25am.

PS - When I walked in this morning they gave me a big pen.

I had a great weekend! I swapped out my workout routine Friday night. Getting up early to work out (as opposed to biking) has just not been working for me. I’ve been out of energy and feeling craptastic all of the time. So, I figured I should do what I did last winter, work out at night after the kids go to sleep. And, pack in both workouts at one time, and only do it every other day. So, I popped in a DVD (watched Donnie Darko again), hopped on the bike trainer for 30 mins, then did weights.

My parents came up to visit Saturday - we met for lunch, then they took the kids while I got a chance to go for a bike ride (a real ride, in the out of doors!). Perfect weather, did a nice leisurely 28 miles - up through Sudbury towards Concord, jogged over past Acton and stopped at Bill’s in Maynard to say hi. Then I headed home through Hudson and on to the bike trail to Marlborough.

Saturday evening was a pot luck dinner at the church, another great time as usual. Lots of awesome food, beer, dessert and church coffee (which I don’t understand why Brent uses that term in a negative way - our church has awesome coffee). Then my parents took the kids for the night.

I actually managed to get some sleep, in fact I woke up late and ended up having to run around like a chicken with its head cut off in order to get to church, get the recording equipment all setup and still make choir rehearsal on time. I did cheat a bit on my way to church, stopped at Ariba coffee in Hudson for a grande dark roast. I’ve been trying to not buy coffee at all, so much more cost effective to brew it yourself - but I was totally dragging this morning after getting too much sleep. In any case, Ariba is awesome! Free wifi, they actually have food (like sausage egg and cheese on a croissant), awesome coffee, modern starbuckian/panera breadian atmosphere, and the local/non-chainism appeal.

In any case, got in some good churchin, then came home, put all the kids in bed, bought some steaks at the supermarket and made a fancy schmancy dinner with wine and bread and real metal utensils. Put the kids to bed and then it was workout time again. Finished Donnie Darko and started up Matchstick Men. I’m going to need to get Netflix going again - and I need to get my DVD recorder fixed, craptacular POS. Had to record Heroes on (yikes) VHS last week. Anyone want to donate a subscription free or lifetime Tivo?

My kids are three years apart in age, but only two weeks in birthday. This makes for a very busy October. Last year we combined their birthday parties, and are doing the same this year. It works out for the best because many of their friends are siblings, so combining parties makes it easier on our fellow parents.

This weekend my parents are coming up to visit and have a little birthday hoopla. Our daughter’s school party is on Saturday, along with a Jack O Lantern carving party, a concert at church, and the MANN game night (and don’t forget soccer practice first thing on Saturday). Sunday brings church with a congregational meeting afterwards, and also the tower hill cleanup.

Our daughter’s birthday is on Monday, our son’s was two week’s ago Monday. During the week our daughter has school and clay class, we have our spiritual parenting class and choir practice, and also various playgroups for the kids.

Next Saturday is the big party, and also soccer practice and a costume parade.

How could we possibly make it through the next two weeks without the help of Google Calendar! Yikes!