Our flight to Newark got slightly delayed because of fog but we still landed before noon. From there we took a new jersey transit train to Penn Station, which cost a little more than I remembered ($14) but was very easy and pretty quick (less than a half hour). Once at Penn Station we met up with Fighty and Sharkey and headed over to the hotel, La Quinta Inn. We were a couple of hours ahead of check-in time, but luckily our room was ready. We dropped off our luggage and began day one of the tour.

Fighty led us most of the day and did a great job. We first walked down Wall Street, an area I had never seen before despite two previous visits to NYC. Next up was Battery Park, which is supposed to have a nice view of the Statue of Liberty. We knew walking over that we weren’t going to be able to see it because of the fog, but we went anyway. At the waters edge we couldn’t see more than 20 feet in front of us, I would say. Slightly disappointed, we headed off to the World Trade Center area. Not much has changed there since the last time I visited, but Kim hadn’t seen it before. After some time there we moved on to Chinatown and then over to Greenwich Village to have dinner and drinks at Torilla Flats. By this time we were joined by our friends Pat and Kristen, and the margarita pitchers were flowing. We polished the night off at a couple of other bars, including the hotel’s roof top bar.

The fog was gone on Saturday, but the rain had arrived. We tried not to let this ruin any of our plans, so we headed out to Times Square and then over to John’s Pizzeria for lunch. We ate a bunch of pizza while in town, but this is the only place I can remember the name of. From there we walked over to 5th Avenue and Rockefeller Center, where we caught a glimpse of the Stanley Cup and Mark Messier. From there we walked through part of Central Park, but by this time we were getting pretty soaked so we headed back towards the hotel. Soon after the pre-gaming began and before we knew it show time had arrived, a sold out show at that! The show was absolutely amazing! I’m sure I will never forget it, and can only hope for shows to come close to matching it. Words really cannot explain it, so hopefully I’ll get some of my pictures up soon.

We spent the rest of the time in NYC hanging out with so many of my friends. It was great to see everyone, although I wish I had more time to talk to everyone. It’s hard with such a large group though. Before we left we did take one last trip back down to Battery Park, despite the freezing temperature, and this time we could see the Statue of Liberty! With that my trip to NYC was complete and I could head home.

New York City on Dwellable

Of course I have my busiest day of work during my last day of this work week. It’s all good though because this time tomorrow I will already be in New York City taking in all of the sights. I have alluded to this trip before but I’m not sure I ever announced it. O.A.R. is playing an almost sold out show at the world’s most famous arena, Madison Square Garden, on Saturday. I will be there (in the third row, thanks to a generous user of oarsa.org) along with a ton of my friends from around the country. Every time we have gone to NYC it has been quite a trip and I don’t expect this one to be any different.

We took all of tomorrow off so that we could get into the city early and do some of those touristy things that everyone does. If you have any last minute sights to see, leave a comment and we’ll do our best to check it out…

Our “team building” exercise down at O’Dowd’s over the weekend must have worked wonders for our volleyball team. We swept our opponents last night, winning all three games! Including the forfeit from last week, we remain undefeated for this session. This is a big improvement over last session, where we finished right in the middle of the pack. Let’s hope we can have more of these “team building” experiences.

After the match Kim and I headed to one of the area Jones Stores to check out their coats one final time. To my surprise, this location had just about every size imaginable in the coat I wanted to buy Kim for Christmas. She tried them all on, along with a few other styles that the store had, and finally decided on the one that I wanted to buy originally. Luckily she found one that fit and the sale that was going on before Christmas was still in effect, so we bought it. I guess my ban on the Jones Store can be lifted for now.

I am also going to be picking up my new computer after work today. I guess this means that I better decide on a name soon. This will complete our Christmas gift exchange just over two weeks behind schedule. :)

It just barely fit under the tree!

We are back to our early morning workout routine. Before yesterday morning, I don’t think I had been to the gym in months. Now I have been two days in a row. Waking up early means going to bed early as well, which is drastically cutting down on topics to write about.

I spent most of last night uploading pictures onto the site. There are a bunch of pictures that Kim took while in Cincinnati for Christmas along with a ton of pictures she took at the party over at Christie’s this past weekend. My favorite album is of our trip to Perfect North while in Cincy. Kim’s brother Chris did a great job with the camera that day!

Such great form!

Friday night was the Great American KC office Christmas party. Kim did a bunch of planning for the event and I was happy to hear that we were heading back to the New Theatre. I bought tickets to this dinner theatre a couple of years ago and we both really enjoyed the evening. This time was no different. The food was great, the play was funny and entertaining, and I think that most of Kim’s coworkers and guests would agree. Afterward we headed to George Brett’s to polish off the night. I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of this bar/restaurant, mainly for it’s location (one of the closest to our apartment) and the fact that it is rarely overly crowded. Their happy hours also have some pretty good deals!

Saturday we got haircuts, ran a couple of errands and then hung out with the kids for a little bit. We went to a community center and spent most of the time playing basketball. I am happy to announcement my first place finish in the around the world competition. I was trying to play nice but Kim kept trying to win everything. Later on we headed down to Christie’s apartment for another Christmas gathering. Other than the gag gift exchange, it was just another party with a bunch of our friends here in KC. It was nice to finally see everyone again. It seems like everyone was on conflicting schedules for the whole month of December.

Sunday got started a little later than we were hoping. We did some shopping in the early afternoon and then headed down to the Brooksider to watch some of the Bengals game. It was like a mini Steelers nation in there, so we left before half time. Actually I had to leave early due to the poor scheduling of my hockey league. The good news is that we are finally back to winning! With the start of this new session we have a website for the league at kchockey.com, which is complete with standing, stats and schedules. I got credit for a goal last night, but I don’t remember scoring. Oh well.

So we bit the bullet and bought a new computer last night. I believe the computer I use at home on a (somewhat) daily basis was bought before I started this blog. I tried searching through the pages of the blog for any reference to this purchase, but I came up empty. That means that this machine (aka Ringo) was bought sometime in 2001, if not earlier, making it over four years old and in need of a replacement.

Ringo is a dell and has treated me very well (bring on the poet line…), so this time I again turned to dell to deliver a quality product. I started searching for the perfect machine before Christmas and finally found it sometime last week. I forced myself to wait a week to see what the next weekly special would be. This week the price went up just a tad on my dream machine and the deals were not much different, so we wasted no time and ordered it.

Okay, it isn’t the best thing ever, but it is a huge upgrade when looking at what I have now. Ringo is somewhere in the range of 1.3 GHz with 256 MB RAM, and a huge conventional CRT monitor that takes up the entire desk. It has two hard drives in it, an 80 GB and a 40 GB (the original), which are almost full, mostly with my recorded shows.

This new machine is 2.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM and a huge 180 GB hard drive. I think my favorite part is the 17 inch flat panel monitor! Oh yeah, I will also have a CD/DVD burner to play with, so hopefully my mom can teach me how she makes all of her DVDs. I can’t wait until it gets delivered!

This means that I will once again be transforming Ringo into my web and ftp server. The machine I borrowed from Phil (aka Skinnyboy) cannot handle the update to edpaffjr.com that I’ve been working on. I haven’t tested the new site out on Ringo yet, but I’m hoping that after I wipe the main drive clean it will perform much better. We’ll see. That leaves Skinnyboy open to serve some other purpose which has yet to be determined.

With all of this news I’m happy to announce the first ever Name Ed’s Computer competition. Just leave a comment to this post and the winner will receive a special, yet to be determined, gift. If you need a little help getting started, let me explain the other computers’ names. Ringo was an old nickname of yours truly while in high school. Skinnyboy was changed from Fatboy, the name Phil had originally given it. Best of luck!

Today is my two year anniversary with OSi, and how do they reward me? They give me a very busy day and another night of working from home. I’m so lucky. Not only have I had to work the past two nights but I get to do it again tonight. All I’ve got to say is that my raise better come shortly. The end of year bonus that I got is not going to cover it!

Peter Gibbons: Lumbergh’s gonna have me work on Saturday. I can tell already. I’m gonna end up doin’ it, because, uh…
[nods]
Peter Gibbons: because I’m a big pussy… which is why I work at Initech to begin with.
Michael Bolton: Uh, yeah, well, I work at Initech and I don’t consider myself a pussy, OK?
Samir: Yes, I am also not a pussy.

We attempted to start another session of volleyball last night, but the other team never showed up. I guess that’s one way to start off the season three and zip. From there we went over to Joel and Amanda’s place to watch some of the Orange Bowl. We had to leave before the game was over, but I’m sure Amanda was happy with the results, I know my boss was.

My brother told me over the weekend that my blog was incredibly boring and that I only ever talk about fantasy football, so this is for him, the last fantasy football post. If you remember from before, I already announced my 4th place finish in one league. I now am proud to announce another 4th place finish and one 3rd place finish! Go me!

My mom has been busy compiling her 406 pictures from this past weekend. I think she was also hoping to add Nancy’s pictures as well. Hopefully Yahoo! doesn’t catch on to her multiple account schemes. :)

What a weekend! I was a little worried that we were going to be too stressed to actually enjoy everyone’s company, but I don’t think it could have been any more fun than it was. Thanks to everyone who made the trip, I hope you enjoyed the festivities as much as I did.

Now for a little recap. When I finally got off work on Friday I headed down to the Granfalloon where some of the visitors had been since around noon. If you remember from the last time my family visited, we spent almost an entire day in this bar. They must have liked it so much that they led others there to do the same on this trip. They took over the back room and forced everyone else out with multiple occurrences of the Bengals Growl. Later in the night we also made an appearance at O’Dowd’s, although it was a much smaller (and less rowdy) crowd.

We started off Saturday as we normally do with visitors, going down to the Boulevard brewery and taking the tour. And of course, no tour is complete without free beer. From there we attempted to have lunch/dinner at Oklahoma Joe’s but it was too crowded for our mob of 30. Instead many stocked up on alcohol for the next day’s tailgate before everyone headed over to Gates to eat. The combination of beer and food sent the crowd in various directions. Some napped, while others headed over to Todd’s place for the traditional NYE whiskey tasting. This led right into the party that we were having at our apartment to ring in the New Year. This was definitely the best party we’ve had at our place. We were slightly concerned beforehand about the size limitations, but it all worked out. Heck, there was even a little duckfood reunion show!

Sunday morning came early. We took a caravan of cars down to the lots around Arrowhead Stadium and began our tailgating. Fortunately the weather was great and the beers were flowing. The game on the other hand was not exciting. Everyone knew that many of the normal Bengals starters would not be playing much, but I was hoping we could still score at least one touchdown. Oh well, it was still a good time and we didn’t get too much crap from the Chiefs fans. After the game we took everyone down to the Brooksider for awhile. Slowly groups of black and orange left the bar and prepared to make the trip back to Cincinnati. Some left late that night and by early Monday afternoon everyone was gone. Hopefully they call can make the trip back out sometime soon!

Last night we also went out to dinner at the Hereford House with Doni, Phil, and Doni’s parents. Doni’s parents were treating us all to a nice dinner for the work we did on kingwoodtrophies.com, although I’m not sure what the girls did. Be sure to click on Phil’s name above to check out his website, and the current events section to read his comments on the weekend.