Sitting in the EBC and a day long presentation to customers. Some boring bits, some really interesting bits, fair food, lame swag. At least I don't have to pay 100% attention all the time.

Mom's surgery is scheduled for 2/13 and she'll be in the hospital for 7-10 days afterward. It must be pretty major, dad wasn't in the hospital that long and he had both knees cut out and replaced.

Parents are here tonight because mom has an appointment with the cancer docs tomorrow morning. She still doesn't really know what's going on even after the biopsy. Maybe tomorrow is when they tell her.

I forgot to mention before but the hamster escaped last Saturday night while we were out. The woman left the top off the cage and he somehow learned to climb. It took us about an hour to find hm hiding under the book case in the radio room. Somehow he managed to climb 18 stairs to get to the top level, and it makes sense that he would hide under the hardest piece of furniture to move. Taking that book case apart to move it is what prompted the 7 hours of reorg on that room on Sunday.

Wednesday evening (I got back from DEN in time) we went to the city council meeting to protest them putting 4 huge LED billboards along the freeway by the house. They put one on 237 and it's blinding at night and horrible in the rain. It's hard enough to drive in constant traffic without being blinded by some shitty advertising. Unfortunately the developer offered to cut the city in on the money so at that point it passed because none of the council people drive or live where they're putting the signs. Can't fight corruption like that even if you try.

Friday's game night I got to play my actual character instead of a pre-gen (my guy is too low of a level for most games so I use a pre-made character and just get to transfer the XP to my guy later). We're almost to the level where the bad guys will be dropping fireballs on us so we need to work on not running around in fireball formation all the time. Here we're getting zapped, but it's only a "Darkness 20' radius" being played, so other than some bumbling and lost time it wasn't bad. The dude using a little army guy as his mini needs to get something period correct.

Today we went to a "combat medic" class at the stabbin' school. I was disappointed at a lot of the material (it's too advanced for laymen to use in the field) but we did get to learn and practice suturing. I did pretty good at sealing up the cut on this little piggy, but I don't think I'll be able to reattach the limb...

I just got a free upgrade to first class on my DEN flight today. Sweet, never gotten a free bump. I'll take that as a parting gift from uncle Jobs. Unfortunately I think I do see my other first class folk in the waiting area. What a bunch of bitchy looking entitled a-holes. Maybe I'm wrong, but usually not when it comes to identifying a-holes.

Saturday we went to dinner with Scott and Lina at some "hot pot" place in Mountain View. I wasn't impressed, it's $20 ramen you have to cook yourself. Big deal. The Kobe beef was unseasoned and when you essentially boil it in water with a touch of seaweed it doesn't really take on any flavor. The sauces you put on after have some flavor to them, but why spring for high-end meat when you're just going to boil and then sauce it? You could probably just cut chuck steak thin like that and it would work as well. Anyway, the meal was bogus but after we went back to their place and got to see their new outdoor fire pit. I don't care for their house all that much (too big) but their lot goes way back up this wooded hill and up on top they built a fire ring and put out some chairs and whatnot. We sat outside with the fire going wrapped in blankets drinking wine and watching the stars and the view of the valley go by. It was just like the best parts of camping and a fantastic evening.

Sunday we spent 7+ hours organizing the back room. Not just shuffling things around, but going through 10+ years of tax returns and making piles to shred, old documents, school records, etc. We had several boxes of crap to take to the shredding place (our little shredder would have taken days to chew through the 2 bankers boxes of stuff) and I consolidated down my boxes of misc crap into, well, fewer boxes of misc crap. We did find some interesting docs, like this drawing of my original Weatherford loft which reading the text reminds me I had to petition to keep the loft since it was technically against spec:

Even further back I found my birth certificate which I knew I had in there, but also this early documentation on me. The trainer dude at the gym asked if I had old body fat records (which I did find, 9% back in 2000) so I should bring this in as a joke:

I actually had Monday off (some holiday of some sort) so I went down to Cottonwood Creek to check it out for real. I spent about 2 hours hiking back in and according to the GPS I only went 0.55 miles from the car. I was heading directly north sorta ignoring the terrain so I was going up and down a lot. Here is where I stopped to take a break down in a canyon by the creek:

Technically I was hunting, I was carrying the .17 but there was nothing out there other than other hunters. I ran into a few, they were looking for quail and no one had seen any birds or rabbits or squirrels or anything other than some hawks. Hopefully the hawks were having better luck than we were. Some random pictures of the trip follow.

I've put as much new life as I can into that old Athlon 2300+ radio PC. It's got 3gb of RAM now and the whopping 80gb HD was replaced with an equally whopping 64gb SSD (another Fry's close out special). I'm kinda shocked the windows performance thing still rates the graphics at 3.2 considering it's running an 8+ year old video card.

Last day in class! Woo! I've been burning the candle at both ends doing class work, actual work for next week and goofing off with Kenny and Dennis. Wait, is that 3 ends?

Last night I managed to get to Kenny's TKD class and only missed the first half or so (thanks Seattle traffic). They do have a lot of cool pads and whatnot that lets you work on timing and impact without worrying so much about hurting each other, but the art itself doesn't look right for me. I like the idea of kicking (vs. punching as I have soft girlie hands) but they seem to focus on a lot of strange kicks that look ineffective in the real world. There was one chick there who was practicing this sweeping low kick that looked highly useful though. would love to master that for the stabbin' class, being able to unexpectedly sweep under a knife and shatter someones knee? Handy.

Sitting in a Starbucks killing time on my way to the airport. I'm only two exits away so I suspect it shouldn't' take me more than 20-30 minutes to get there. :)

I added the stealth photo I took of the Whitman chicks on Sunday. I didn't think it came out but in fact it's actually usable. I know if nothing else it will make Vareck happy.

In Seattle in training... first day down, 4 to go. Class is about to start but at least today they've given us the wifi password so we can check email and whatnot without having to tether to our phones.

At SFO awaiting for my flight to SEA. In training all next week; here's to hoping it's as good as I've been told it should be.

Across from me are two college girls, you can tell from their chatter about classes and advisers and whatnot. One is wearing a Whitman sweatshirt and looking that up it makes sense they would be on a Seattle bound flight. One is pretty cute, and the smarter of the two I would guess, or at least the least annoying. The other is a frizzy-haired freak that should do well marrying some rich guy and spending her time with pet causes and being an activist.

Last night the woman took me to SF for some work function. A social gathering of the usual therapist suspects, shrinks and crazies. It wasn't bad, we took BART up and back and other than a couple of stoned kids on the the train and 2 homeless people accosting us the trip was uneventful. I took a few pics of the lobby and the, uh, art? outside.

Little cold out there today, the mats at the driving range were frosty (although there wasn't as much frost on the 4runner's front window as usual, maybe parking under that tree helped just a little?).

Yesterday we had this mandatory sales training rah-rah session but it was all via WebEx. To make sure you paid attention they had a contest with a bunch of questions and whatnot. Those of us in the room worked together to answer all the questions together in the first 20 minutes of the two hours, and mostly didn't pay attention to whatever koolaid they were trying to get us to drink. There were a few questions that were based on the content of the presentations and we had to guess at the right answers to those, but rather than all guess we would take turns guessing and then all adjust if the guesser was wrong. It worked well, for me anyway. My guesses were all correct, my boss missed 1 and ended up with a 107 score and Kathleen missed 2 and was down at 102. If not for their sacrifices in being wrong, I couldn't be #1. Woo! Oh wait, I got sorted lower than the other guy with the perfect score. Humph. Anyway, the top 20% get put into a drawing for a $200 apple gift card. WTF will I do with a $200 apple gift card? Sounds like a re-gift to me.

Did my section of the EDA update today. It was a bit rushed, had to trim it on the fly from 15 minutes to only 12 and integrate some info from previous speakers that came up during their parts. It was scary, yet fun at the same time. Felt good to knock that out of the park.

Mom went to Stanford today and they did some poking around and those docs have a different approach than the docs up in Jackson. Stanford wants to run some tests, do a biopsy, and try to use various drugs to shrink the tumor to see exactly what type it is before they get in there. They said it too big of an operation for "robotic surgery" so the guy is going to have to do it by hand when it gets done. I think this is her doc: Mark Gonzalgo. The robotic surgery images on Stanford's page look either amazingly advanced or really scary depending on your point of view.

Going to limp home now. A guy sorta fell on me last night in stabbin' class and my hip popped when it tried to move in an unnatural way. Painful.

Went to the Miens' house last night for dinner, Ally is headed back to school today so they wanted us to stop by. Fun time, but I was out until 11:30pm and did fall asleep in the car. Too late for this old man.

I picked up another cheap SSD drive at Fry's today (along with some 99-cent 9-LED flashlights that came with batteries, how can you beat that?) and brought the radio PC back to life. It's drive was still working, an old 80gb so it wasn't a big deal to use the transfer program to get that moved to the 64gb SSD. I gotta say though the performance difference isn't as great on that system as it appeared to be on the others. It's an Athlon 3200+, 2ghz with 1.5gb RAM. I was going to bump the ram to 4gb but Fry's wanted almost $30/gig for the old PC3200 sticks. Pass.

Here are some pics of that $20 knife I had to ship to AZ. Still not sure why this isn't legal in CA.

Some of the gifts my parents got me for giftmas. A bolt action pen made out of actual wood and a copper bullet, and an expandable backscratcher.

As if their gifts are better than the things I buy for myself, 99 cent flashlights and this winner of a tool (which will go into the truck's supply box at some point when I'm done being amused by the box):

The woman's elk enchiladas tonight. Awesome, best elk meal to date I think. I really want to get a tortilla press and make my own tortillas. The raw, cook at home ones are good but I think it would be fun to make them from scratch too.

My parents are coming down to stay with us on Monday night. Mom has an appointment at the cancer treatment center at Stanford on Tuesday morning early so they're just going to crash here vs. trying to drive down in the early AM to avoid traffic. Once they schedule the pre-op tests and get all that taken care of they can cut our her kidney and hopefully get all the cancer bits out. The risk is still if the tumor has attacked that return vein to her heart. If it has they have to stop her heart and replace that bit of vein, then restart her heart. Sounds risky to me.

Went into the office today to work on my next presentation. It takes 11.5 minutes if I just read the text of what I wrote, and 15-16 minutes if I just wing it and put in lots of good detail. I'm hoping I have time to wing it, it's so much better when I just give the presentation vs. trying to edit it down.

The weather is still dodgy but I actually rode the bike to work today (after going to the driving range).

At said driving range I did pretty poorly, I still have no idea how to actually control the club head rotation. I did get a little more scientific and measure out things so I could setup for the same shot the same way each time. Trying to isolate as many variables as I can.

At the game last night I got stuck at the 2nd tier table again but it was actually a fun run, and I learned that David, the super character building GM, doesn't hate me because of who I am, he hates me because I'm incompetent. He was just as nasty to other people who weren't 100% accurate with the rules as he is with me all the time so I figure it's just his general disdain of non-power gamers and nothing really to do with me. That makes me feel better I guess.

The woman just booked our tickets to North Carolina, I guess we really are going. We're using the flight credit I got from that bumped Israel flight all those years ago to pay for most of it. she's pissed that it assigned me to "economy plus" and she's stuck in the back. I'm sure we can fix that at some point, although I imagine it means I'll have to go back. How exciting to board in the platinum line then wander to the back of the bus with the regular folk.

Back in the office again. Everyone seems really happy to be back, probably because now we can get back to getting paid! Unpaid leave sucks.

Couple of pics to start the year off right-ish. First, a ridiculous pic of a pic of the woman has a child with her brother and grandmother. She can still do that ridiculous forced smile if asked.

Next up is the pic the woman put on facetube for new years. She tortures that rodent so much with these ridiculous photo shoots. At least now he gets a break until, what, valentines day?

At one of the giftmas dinners the woman got a recipe for this Hungarian something or another. The brown stuff is basically carrots/celery/onions/mushrooms and actually tastes pretty good with the elk roast in there. The bread balls are not all that tasty so the woman made up some spaetzle last night to use with the sauce and meat tonight. I think that's going to be a winning combo. Healthy too since it's mostly just pureed veggies over a little meat and dumplings.

This is mostly here just for my reference. On the way down to PHX we tried to find the entrance to the cottonwood creek wildlife area, possibly the closest place to the bay area where hunting is OK. We couldn't find it on the way out but we found it on the way back (there is a sign if you're coming in from the south side) so I took this of the radio's GPS so I could find it on topo maps later. I'm going to try to get out there at some point soon if for no other reason than to look around.

Happy new year and all that.

Sitting here waiting for the 8:30 HF net to start because I'm able to hear it now that I've swapped the hamstick on the roof from 10m to 80m. Don't think I can TX though, when I try the panel on the PC freaks out and the woman reports that the TV is going nuts. Sounds like a little bit too much RF in the shack. I used the analyzer on the antenna and it's awesome in the PSK31 range, 12:1 or worse on 3.878 MHz where the net is. I can hear two guys chatting right now but no one is using call signs so I don't know where they are.

Yesterday I went bird hunting up at Quail Point; ended up with the same rental dog I got last time and it worked out about as well this time. What was really interesting was the number of hawks flying around. The dog and I came around this hill and I saw a hawk trying to take flight with a chuckar in it's talons. Hey, that's my bird! The hawk dropped the chuckar and I found it but it was a little beat up. Later in the hunt the hawks scored again but this time they managed to eat all of the head/neck meat before I could catch up and chase them off. That's not a big deal since I don't use the heads anyway but it's still annoying to be competing with the hawks for birds I'm paying for. I turned 4 of the birds I got into jerky (which came out awesome if I have to say so myself because the woman is afraid to try it) and 3 of the larger ones are frozen for cooking later. Not sure what I'll do with them yet but we have lots of recipes to try.