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!