After work on Friday Kim and I headed to dinner at Brio. The food was wonderful and mostly free since we had some gift cards to use. From there we headed back to the apartment and put together the new office desk that I bought from a guy on craigslist for $30. It is big enough for both sets of monitors, keyboards and mice. I’ll have to take some pictures of the new setup, it looks really nice.

Kim left early on Saturday morning for San Antonio, the location of Great American’s annual conference. After sleeping in for a few more hours, I put together a new filter for the turtle tank. I hope that the tank will require much less maintenance than before. From there I sat at the computers and made some progress in getting them all working as I want them to. I’m to the point where I am ready to install Windows XP on Ringo, the old dell machine. From there it should be easy to get the webserver setup and hopefully run some tests on it. Soon enough it was time for the guys’ weekend to start. Todd, Mike, and I first went up to Harling’s to watch the one and only Mama Ray. From there we headed to Kelly’s for a few rounds and some pizza. Finally we ended up at the Levee to listen to Groove Agency once again. It was a nice night out.

Sunday I had lunch at The Mixx, a rather new restaurant next to Chipotle. The food was good, but it’s a little pricey. From there I picked up a few things at the grocery and headed home to make some Skyline dip. Mike and I walked over to Todd’s a couple of hours before the big game, to start tasting some of the leftover bourbon from the New Year’s tasting. The party was a nice way to round out the weekend, even though the Steelers won. :)

Last night was tax night, well at least for me. I started off by filling both of our federal returns. I know that I said last year that I didn’t like the way H&R Block’s questionnaire worked, but filling online is so much easier than any other way I’ve done it. It’s free for us, you don’t have to send anything in, and your refund is direct deposited very quickly. Obviously, I choose this same method again. The nice thing was that the answers I entered for many of the questions last year were automatically filled in this year. I completed my return first and I will be receiving an $850 refund! The IRS has already accepted my return and I should have the money direct deposited within a week or two. Next I did Kim’s federal return hoping for something similar, but as it turns out she owes $10. The nice thing was that we could set this up to be automatically withdrawn from a checking account.

I then tried to do our state returns the old fashioned way, since H&R Block will charge you to file your state returns. Missouri has an online PDF that automatically calculates most of the blanks. I attempted to use this on my old PC but it kept freezing. So then I tried the same form on my new PC. I got the whole thing filled in and then I went to print it out. One problem though, the stupid thing wouldn’t recognize the network printer that’s hooked up to the old PC. I tell ya, this is a never ending project! I called it a night and I just got done with the state returns here at work. I’ll be getting $61 and Kim will be getting $115. Our overall return will be $1016. Time to plan another trip!

We went over to the kids’ house last night for what might be the last time we see Dominique. Supposedly he is flying to Atlanta today to live with his grandma. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this from them, but it sure seemed pretty truthful last night. Overall he seems pretty excited about the move, and I think it will be good for him. He has so many responsibilities here with caring for his three younger sisters along with taking care of himself at the age of 13. This will allow him to actually be a kid and do the things that most kids take for granted. I gave my phone number to him again, and told him that he can find the Atlanta office of Big Brothers Big Sisters to get paired up again. We’ll see if the move goes through this time…

Someone finally beat ‘Off Each Other’, our volleyball team for this session. We had a match last night against one of the better teams in the league. Kim missed the game because she was on her way back to KC from Salt Lake City. Perhaps that was what threw off our rhythm because something definitely changed. If you remember from before, our team was dominating the competition before last night. After losing the first two games we were finally able to win the last. At least we weren’t swept. Our team has dropped from 1st place to 2nd place, and we are looking at a tough couple of weeks ahead of us.

Both Kim and Christie will be gone for next week’s game, and to make it worse we are playing another pretty good team. Then the week after that we will be playing the now top team of the league, so hopefully we are back to full strength. I’m hoping for a strong finish so we can take back the top spot in the league and receive a t-shirt or whatever crap they give the winners.

Last night was pretty uneventful. Kim is on her first trip to Salt Lake City (one of her new territories for work) yesterday and today, so I sat at the computer and caught up on all of the usual sites that I waste lots of time on. I treated myself to dinner from Chipotle, but I guess that I should have gone today and bought a gift card. I also put up the pictures from our trip this weekend, so the night wasn’t a complete waste.

The weekend was a blast and there was never a dull moment. Kim and I finally made it to Manchester, NH (31st visited state) a little after 9PM Thursday. We met up with Tracey and Weeba at the airport and then started the drive to Killington, VT (32nd visited state). Along the way we picked up sampler packs from both Long Trail and Magic Hat Brewing Companies. We then got checked into the hotel/condo and spent the rest of the night catching up over a few drinks.

We woke up pretty early on Friday to get a jump on the crowds. I guess the weather hasn’t been the best out there, but it was perfect upon our arrival. The temperature stayed right around freezing (while the sun was out) and snow was being made often. The only time it got bad was when the wind would gust and blow away all of the powder. Then you would be left with patches of ice to ski/board on. I only took one bad fall on Friday, hitting my toe right on one of these patches of ice. It was towards the end of the day, so I toughed it out and then iced it a bunch afterward. Friday was our relaxing night, since we still had another day on the mountain. We sat in the hot tub, had pizza from Pizza Jerks, watched some TV, drank some of the beers, etc.

Saturday was another early day for us. We needed to take full advantage of our time to make sure our bodies were full of pain. One highlight of the day was the burritos we had from the Baja Burrito stand at one of the bases. Another highlight was attempting to ski/board back to our hotel after a few rounds in the lodge bar. Thankfully we were not on a steep slope, it could have been ugly. We had dinner at the hotel restaurant, Sky Box Grill, and then headed out on the town. Our first stop was the Pickle Barrel, which didn’t last long. They had a $20 cover charge, per person! Instead we went over to the Upper Deck Sports Lounge. We had some drinks there, until they switched bartenders, and the new one wouldn’t let Weeba drink because of his paper driver’s license. We then headed to Moguls Sports Pub to finish off the night.

We had to be checked out at 10AM on Sunday, which was a little earlier than I would have liked, but the stop at Blanche & Bill’s Pancake House made it worthwhile. We then made the drive back to Manchester and arrived plenty early for our flights later in the day. I’ve never been extremely afraid of flying, but a few people on our flight must think that I am. Shortly after takeoff, I started to feel a little weak, sweaty, shaky, etc. I felt like I couldn’t breathe very well, but in actuality I was hyperventilating. A very kind doctor said that I might have had a low blood sugar level that triggered this, along with the anxiety of flying. He considered it a panic attack, something that I am familiar with but didn’t think I would ever experience. And now that I might have experienced one, I hope to never experience it or anything like it again.

Despite the craziness of yesterday, the trip was well worth it and everyone had a blast! We talked about doing it again next year, either to Killington again or somewhere else in the northeast.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on a website for the Sigma Phi Epsilon Missouri Gamma Chapter. Last night I finally got a header that I liked enough to start actually working on a site layout. You can view what I have done here, and if you want you can click the header numbers to see how the design progressed from an original idea into what it is now. The other links on the site do not work and I’m sure I’ll be making some changes to the header and layout, so feel free to leave some comments and feedback.

My day of work is almost over. I’ll be leaving in about a half hour, which will start our vacation to Killington, Vermont. I’m sure it will be a blast. I’ll give you my review when we are back in KC on Monday. Have a nice weekend…

We start winning a few volleyball games and next thing you know team ‘Off Each Other’ is discussing a day long tournament. I think all of this winning has gotten to their heads, but maybe that’s just my broken toe talking. We’ll see how the rest of this session plays out and then we’ll talk about tournaments.

Anyway, we had another match last night and once again we swept the opposition in all three games. Our record is now 11-1 and we should have a solid grasp on 1st place by at least one game. I’d know for sure if the JCPRD ever updated the site in a timely manner. I played pretty well, but my bum toe is still holding me back some. Hopefully I don’t re-injure it too badly in Vermont this weekend at our ski/snowboard trip.

See what happens when my fantasy football leagues are over? I have nothing to write about. Actually what I did do last night was try to learn a little extra money by creating a webpage for the Missouri Gamma Chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon at the University of Missouri-Rolla. It’s intimidating to be creating a page for a group at a technical school. I would have guessed that they could have done it themselves. Regardless, I’ve been trying to get something together for them and I finally sat down last night and put some ideas onto paper (actually my computer screen). Hopefully I can come up with an entire layout in the next couple days. If so, I’ll link to it so I can get some extra comments on the design. I should have time to do so since Kim is taking a business trip tomorrow.

Friday night started off pretty relaxing, with some pasta for dinner and a couple of drinks. Then Mike and Christie came over and the euchre games began. I would advise never playing euchre with Christie as she gets more loner hands in one game than I have ever had. From there we headed down to The Levee for additional drinks, some dancing, and great times!

Saturday was spent cleaning up the apartment and rearranging the office in preparation for a new computer desk that can hold my growing home network. I finally got the new computer on the network, and the process of transferring files has begun. Later in the evening we hosted a party for the recent engagement of Christina, one of Kim’s coworkers, and Taylor. The party eventually shifted down to O’Dowd’s, where Tanner Walle and friends were putting on a show. It was nice to see them again, even if they were playing only cover songs. Hopefully we can make it out to another show soon.

Yesterday we took the kids out to the movies and saw Dreamer. It was a nice family movie that everyone seemed to enjoy. We then spent a little time at a pet store and called it a day. I was able to play hockey last night even though my toe is still a little sore. We won once again and should now be in first place in the league.