It has been a busy past few weeks especially at work. I really haven't had much time at all to think let alone blog. I did however have a great past week. Wednesday I picked up our family Christmas/my birthday present which was a 46" LCD HDTV. When I got home, Brad (Lisa's brother), Bev and Ted were at the house already. Brad and I unpacked the television and hooked it up. The picture in HD is amazing. You can actually see the imperfections on a supermodel's face. After a run to the beer store to pick up our libations for the next few days, we had a few of Brad's homebrews that he brought along and settled in and watched some television.

Thursday morning, I had a bit of a stress meltdown and snapped at Lisa about helping out in the kitchen. As she should have, she pretty much put me in my place. Everyone did their part in making the meal as nice as ever...thanks everyone! Brad and I did our traditional freeze our tails off deep frying of the bird which turned out very well. The turkey may have been the best I've fried so far. After stuffing myself to max capacity and taking my annual Thanksgiving siesta, I watched a bit more tv before heading to bed.

Friday, Lisa and I had to go to work so we decided to hit a few of the Black Friday sales. We ended up at Meijer at 5am, then to Menards for their 6 am opening and finally to Target. All the trips were pretty successful. I picked up a pneumatic framing nail gun for when I finally decide to start the basement and we picked up various odds and ends for the kids. Lisa and I worked until noon and then headed home.

When I got home, Lisa's family and the kids threw me a surprise early 40th (yes I said 40th) birthday party. Since Brad was in town and my big gift was all the equipment to begin my journey in homebrewing, it seemed appropriate to celebrate while Brad was in town. Plus Brad walked me through my first batch of homebrew. Friday evening, Jill, Todd and Skylar stopped by as well and brought me over a couple of growlers full of beer from The Maumee Brewing Company; like I really needed to drink more beer. We hung out and had a few beers and that pretty much was Friday. I spoiled my 30th surprise party which was huge but this time Bev and Lisa really pulled one over on me. Thanks everyone for some really great gifts that will keep giving.

Saturday Brad, Todd and I make my very first batch of homebrew in the garage. One of my gifts was a kit to brew IPA which has fast become my favorite style of beer (I am a self proclaimed hop-head). Everything seems to have went well brewing. The yeast seem to be happy eating up all the sugar and farting out alcohol at a pretty good rate. My basement is beginning to smell like a first class microbrewery. In just about 3 weeks, I will be drinking my very first 5 gallon batch of homemade beer. After we brewed, we went to lunch at Easystreet downtown, stopped at the Woodville surplus store and made a trip to The Anderson's. We were pretty much exhausted by the end of the day and all headed to bed pretty early.

Sunday, Brad took off early in anticipation for the snow they were forecasting for Chicago. Lisa went shopping and I cleaned out the garage, put up the two outdoor Christmas trees and then hung a few pictures, moved some furniture around and put up the tree. Once Lisa got home, she moved some of Katelyn's stuff upstairs to her room and then we all decorated the 12 foot monster tree in the family room. After we put up the tree, I decided it would be a great idea to drop my mobile phone in a glass of beer. Just in case you wanted to try this yourself, I would highly recommend you don't. While beer is fun for humans to drink, cell phones don't like to function after submersed in the stuff. Today, I had to get another phone.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I also got my 2009 opening day tickets last week! There are 9 of us this year. We added a friend from high school and Todd from Toledo this year. Todd has no idea what he's in for!

There's been so much more happen since I blogged last but I am getting tired and need to get to sleep. Here are a few pictures from the past week:

Katelyn and Uncle Brad

Just a couple of Turkeys

Annual TG Siesta

Surprise

Cool Batman pajamas from Shawn (not under-roos)

Wow, that's a lot of gifts!
(Thanks everyone!)

Just a quick picture post to show you my latest endeavor. Katelyn seems to enjoy telling her Dad that she needs to go poopie or potty. Of course I rush to the bathroom and rip her diaper off to find out she just wanted to sit on the toilet and laugh at me. At least she not afraid of the porcelain god! Wonder why she hasn't put Lisa through this farce yet?

The past weekend was both fun and productive. Friday was pretty much spent on starting to get the house cleaned up for our party on Saturday. The house was way overdue for a pretty heavy duty cleaning. I even washed the baseboards! Saturday morning Shawn ran in a one mile race, the goblin gallop, and finished 11th out of 18 2nd grade boys. He finished the mile in about 9 minutes which is pretty good for someone who's seven and only starting running this fall. He was 3 minutes off the winning time but finished strong with 7 others behind him. I'm glad he found a sport that he seems to enjoy.

The party on Saturday was nice. It went much better than I expected; I'm not sure why I had such low expectations. The party pretty much consisted of eating, drinking beer, watching OSU get their rear-ends kicked (not totally unexpected), talking about the kids and their grade cards and listening to constant running around of 9 kids ages 1 to 8. Everyone was pretty much gone by 10 pm except for Jill and Todd who stuck around to watch the 2nd half of the game.

Sunday was a day of relaxation! Nothing but hanging out watching TV with the kids while Lisa went out to do a little Christmas shopping. Sunday evening I ended up making Chicken Paprikash and Spatzle. Both were a first for me and it turned out pretty well. I may have used about a tablespoon too much of paprika but overall it turned out really well. Spatzle making is a blast too. Who would have thought making Spatzle was so easy?

Finally this weekend looks to be one with nothing major planned. I will finish up winterizing the yard and organizing the garage for the winter. I may just be so inclined to build another storage shelf or two in the basement or clean the carpets. We will see. Have a great week and a Spooky Halloween!

Here's a bunch of videos we took of Katelyn this evening. Sorry there's so many but we had problems trying to pick which one(s) we should post. Sorry Lisa, I have a new girl in my life......

I almost forgot to tell you about the most exciting thing that has happened this summer. My long time friend Jeff is a long time entry hog of sweepstakes and he wins quite a few. I decided with a little encouragement and guidance from him to start entering sweepstakes as I run across them online and wherever I find an entry form and the prize is one that I deem worthwhile to pay the taxes if I were lucky enough to actually win one. As luck will have it and after about 3 months or so of heavy entering just about every sweepstakes I could find, I finally won!

I won a 4 day, 3 night vacation in Key West. My trip includes airfare, hotel, rental car and $1000 spending money! We are planning an April trip and have hotel reservations at the Hyatt and they rented a convertible for my use during my stay. I still can't believe I actually won. Un-freaking believable! About 3 weeks later, I also found out that I won a $25 gift cart to Dave and Busters. Now if I could only hit the lottery......

Summer seemed to fly by. Shawn's first quarter of school is over, everything is turning brown and work is starting to get busy once again. Where did the summer go? My blogging has not been as regular as it probably should be but I'll once again tell you I will try and be better.

Katelyn is talking up a storm. She's still the little handful and makes it difficult to get anything accomplished around the house but she's a blast to watch and talk to. She seems to have her Mommy and Daddy wrapped.

Shawn has had a busy start to his school year. He decided that he wanted to join the cross country team at school. Cross country in 2nd grade is a new concept on me. I didn't even know that cross country existed until I was in 7th grade. Shawn really seemed to enjoy running; I'm not sure who's genetic code has the love of running in it but he got it. His practices, which were 4 days a week consisted of pretty much 45 minutes of motion of one kind or another. He typically ran between 1-1/2 to 2 miles at every practice and the races for his age group (2nd & 3rd grade) was 3/4 mile. He started practice about 2 weeks later than most of the other kids but he got better as the season progressed. It was pretty amazing to see 140-150 kids his age (only the boys) run at a meet. They had 5 meets and his school was far and above better than the others. At the diocese meet, each of the divisions for his school won a trophy. I think 6 were first place, 1 was runner up and one was third place. Shawn's group ended up in first place in 4 of 5 meets this year. I think he liked it so much that he will be doing it again this year. Up to this point, cross country is the only sport that he really seemed to enjoy.

Shawn is also involved in piano lessons. Lisa and I have had a piano that was my grandmothers for the past 12 years or so. It has survived 3 moves and has broke my back on 2 of those moves so you can guess that I am thrilled that the piano is getting some use other than the occasional pounding it gets from Katelyn. He seems to be excelling through his first half dozen lessons and I am trying to teach myself as he moves forward.

I just got home from a trade show in Fort Worth Texas. The trade show was downtown and within walking distance of a lot of things to do. We ended going to a Cajun restaurant called Razzoo's one night where I had the Cajun combo skillet. The food was just average but different. I also got to go and have several beers at the coolest draft beer bar I have ever been to except for the time I went to the same bar in Houston for lunch. Unfortunately in Houston, I had calls to make after lunch so I couldn't enjoy the tasty liquid goodness they offer. The Flying Saucer has the best selections of been on tap that I have ever seen in one place. I bet you they had close to 100 beers on tap and probably that many in the bottle. I had an Arrogant Bastard, an Avery's Maharajah, Bear Republic Racer 5 and a sampler flight that included Dale's pale Ale, Maharajah, racer 5, one of the Chimay drafts and a Stone Pale Ale (I think). I would be in serious trouble if The Flying Saucer was in Toledo; I would never leave the bar.

The next night, there were several parties for exhibitors in hospitality suites in one of the conference hotels. One of the suites served Mexican themed finger food along with margaritas, another served up a full bar, another was wine flights and various finger foods and another purely wine and beer. We were also invited to another exhibitor's flight for something he called the underground wine lovers club. This guy was really creepy. He had to be about 50 and he pretty much invited any cute woman under the age of 30 to this party. I have no idea why we got invites but we did. When we got there, he was there with two women and 7 cases of wine. We filled up and took off. The next morning we talked to others that were invited an it seems that there were never more than 12 people at the party at any one time. All this guy was trying to do is lure sweet young things into his suite and then into the bathroom for a little extra circulars. He was really creepy. After that, we met up with a bunch of other exhibitors that were going to another party. This party was pretty cool. It was in an old speakeasy called Scat. Scat was located in an alley and you had to take an elevator from the outside directly into the bar that was in the basement. The entire bar was closed for this function, in which we pretty much crashed, and the bar was open. There was a guy set up with his ipod singing Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra songs who was not only a pretty good singer but entertaining as well. We had several drinks at Scat, saw some of the exhibitors who had booths near ours at the show and then took off. At this point, my co-worker wanted to stay up all night and party away but needed some food first. Where does one eat at 10:30pm in downtown Forth Worth? We ended up at the Fox and Hound. As soon as we ordered food, the Jack Daniels hit my co-worker like a ton of bricks! He couldn't get back to the hotel soon enough!

Other than that, there was a whole lot of other things that took place but I will not bore you anymore and I would have a tough time writing about all of them. This weekend will be about winterizing the yard and getting ready for a small party we are having with some of the families we have met through Shawn's school activities. We are hosting 3 couples and their kids next Saturday for a giant play date (9 kids). I'm sure there will be a few adult beverages and a fire pit involved as well.

Shawn and his CC team at the awards dinner

We're number one!

I've been terribly busy and not good at updating lately. I am heading to Fort Worth for a trade show tomorrow and when I get back I will make an effort to try and be better. I wonder if anyone is even checking to see if I'm updating anyway. Funny how life seems to get in the of something as simple as blogging.