So we drove out to the airport to reserve my flight to San Diego, and we get there 15 minutes after the ticket counter closed. You are probably thinking we got there around 10PM or so, but NO we got there at 7:45…The counter closes at 7:30! The last Delta flight out of KC is at 7:15 or so. Unbelievable. So we find a nice guy who points us towards a not so nice lady at the baggage office. Eventually she gave in and allowed us to pay for my flight (as long as it didn’t involve cash). I got my flight to San Diego for something like $30. :) The total was around $230 but we had $200 from the last time Kim volunteered to be bumped from Cincinnati to KC. Can’t beat that! I will be in San Diego on the night of April 5th and we are flying back on the 9th. Should be a quick but enjoyable trip! Now I have to figure out the hotel accommodations…

Remember the free iPod deal from a long time ago. Well today I got an email that my free iPod has shipped! I’m still leaning towards selling it, especially since I hardly use the Nomad that I already have (besides for recording). The best part is that I just got done selling my old Canon Elph battery charger. I got $30 dollars for the charger, looks like I need to start searching for more junk to sell. The positive feedback I get form the sell should convince people to bid freely on my auctions. We’ll see what I decide when it actually gets here though.

I also finished up the sonic website today. Check it out at www.northlandsonic.com!

I guess the talk of San Diego before pushed Doni & Phil to book a flight so Kim is also working on ours. We still have a voucher to use from Delta, so we have to drive out to the airport tonight to use it since we do not have any ticket offices here in town. Guess I should narrow down the hotel decisions…

After work Friday we picked Bobbi and Chris up from the airport and headed back to our apartment for some drinks, checkers, music, darts, etc. Doni and Phil stopped over as well. This led to a brief discussion about our April trip to San Diego. I am now incharge of getting our hotel figured out. I think I’ll start bidding on priceline sometime soon. The rest of the night was a good time. It ended with the GCL (Chris and me) beating the GGCL (Kim and Bobbi) 2-1 in a few games of darts!

Saturday Kim and I made a big breakfast consisting of waffles, turkey bacon and goetta that Chris brought from Cincy. Doni and Phil came over again since they had never had goetta before. I too am relatively new to this stuff even though I lived in Cincy for quite some time. I must say that it is not bad stuff though. After breakfast we shopped on the Plaza for a few hours. Later in the day we headed down to Southwest Boulevard to have a late lunch at one of the authentic Mexican restaurants down there. Another good meal there, we have yet to be disappointed by any of the restaurants there. We then went to Union Station to see the train displays and we also watched a movie on natural disasters on the Extreme Screen. From there I took everyone on my own little tour of Kansas City. We first drove by Kauffman Stadium and Arrowhead Stadium. Next was a trip to Independence, MO which is the home of Harry Truman. I was pretty much out of ideas from there, but I knew that Bobbi and Chris needed to at least visit Kansas. I drove down to the most logical place I could think of, the Sprint world headquarters, haha. I guess Kansas really isn’t that exciting of a place. We finally decided to go to the Outlaws hockey game at Kemper Arena. They got killed by Kalamazoo but at least it was a good time. Pictures are now up from the day…

Sunday we had to drop them back off at the airport, but first we had lunch at Gates BBQ. I told them they had to have Kansas City BBQ before they left, and this place is quite the experience. After dropping them off, we had quite the typical Sunday. Grocery shopping, cleaning, etc. Later in the night we went over to Susans for tacos and Sopranos. That marked the end of another good weekend!

The first week of 2005 is almost over, moving quickly so far! Let’s see, Wednesday night I took some time to work on the sonic website. It is now complete and we are working on buying a domain name and some hosting space. It should be up in the next couple days. You can see the page here. As always feedback is welcome…

Last night we had finally had enough of being cooped up all night so we headed to the Brooksider and met up with Todd, Phil and Doni. The bearcats had a big win, so that was a nice surprise. It was only the second or third time I’ve seen them play this year. Now with replaytv I should be able to record them all the time though! By the way, I am growing very fond of it already. I have not tried to take a movie from the unit and put it on my computer yet, but maybe sometime this weekend I will do that.

Tonight Kim’s sister Bobbi and her boyfriend Chris are coming to visit for the weekend. Hopefully we can show them a good time while they are here!

I almost forgot, here is something to cure your boredom. Incredible pictures from the Hubble telescope.

Well Kim got off work at noon, totally unfair. I’m still here at work, but hopefully I’ll be gone within an hour. I did glance out the window while in a meeting just a bit ago and saw a car in the ditch in the middle of the highway. The roads do not seem to be any better, in fact they are probably worse then when I drove in this morning. It hasn’t really stopped precipitating at all today. I think it switched to snow for a while but soon moved back to the sleet and freezing rain. Oh so much fun!

With all this weather excitement, I forgot to mention that today is my workaversary. That’s right, I have no officially been employed at OSI for one full year. Next up a raise, well at least I hope so. :)

I would like to apologize once again for the downtime. I have been messing with my network a bunch the past couple of days. The good news is, I think I fixed it! That’s right, I have a router installed and all of my servers are functioning correctly. I ended up taking the D-Link back to the store and getting a Netgear. After an hour or so I was up and running with my server working perfectly. We also took some time last night to setup ReplayTV. Looks like it will be working perfectly on this network. We even set it up to record Oprah for Kim everyday. Looks like my networking troubles are finally over. That is until we move across the hall, haha.

An ice storm hit yesterday afternoon. It really isn’t as bad as they were making it out to be. The hardest part about getting here to work today was thawing out the car. The roads are mainly slushy and there is less than an inch of it there. I think I averaged about 45 on the highway coming in, so it just took a little longer. I wish it would have closed down the city, but we weren’t so lucky. Looks like I’ll be here all day…

First of all, happy new year to you all! Can’t wait until the first time I write 2004 and then have to somehow find a way to change the 4 to a 5. Always an adventure…

I can’t really remember all the way back to Thursday night. It seems like forever ago. I bet that we just went to the gym and worked out, then went home and cooked a meal. Wait I think it’s all coming back to me. We had dinner and watched the movie Terminal. We also watched Twenty First Dates at some point in the weekend.

Friday we headed down to the plaza Panera for lunch. We meant to go down for breakfast, but by the time we got there we were ready for a sandwich and soup. From there we had our day of shopping with gift cards we had accumulated, and also exchanging a few things here and there. I was pretty tired of shopping by the end of it. Throughout the day we had many conversations with Joel and Amanda about what to do. We had gone back and forth with the all inclusive Uptown Theater idea or the cheaper Pomeroy show at the Lucky Brewgrille. We eventually decided to try and save some money and do the Pomeroy show. We found out that if we went and had dinner at the restaurant that we could get in for free to the show (a $25 ticket) so we went early for dinner. It wasn’t bad, but the fact that we got in for free made it all worthwhile. We had the closest booth to the stage, so it was like we were VIP for the night. It was an excellent time, and we even got free mini bottles of champagne. All in all I think we spent close to the price of the Uptown, but I think we had a much better time! I put some pictures up, so head on over and check those out…

Saturday we headed to Todd’s place once we finally got moving. He had a few different bottles of premium bourbon whiskey that he wanted me to taste. We made some skyline dip and the 4 of us (Phil stopped over as well) destroyed it in no time at all. The football games were entertaining throughout the day. Doni eventually stopped over as well, just in time for the pizza dinner. It was a nice relaxing day!

Sunday we had Chipotle for lunch. I’m so glad that I got so many gift certificates there, it was excellent! From there Kim and I decided to clean the apartment. We mostly concentrated on the floors since I think we had only done them a couple times before. The apartment looks pretty good, but I’m still holding out for the one across the hall. Hopefully we hear something about that this week…

I’m starting a new project at work today. I am automating many of the test scripts that we run occasionally on the software. We should run them more often, but don’t have the time to do so. Hopefully once I get this done, we can run scripts on the software frequently so that we can catch problems before the clients do. :)