And On To 2009 We Go..

Happy New Year everyone!!!!

No Playoffs This Year

As my friend Phil so eloquently put it, "only Brett Favre has the ability to disappoint two fan bases at the same time." Well said my friend...

I'm Back

So needless to say, we had a fantastic time time while down in Boston for Christmas. We got to see a lot of family and some friends and of course had a lot of great food. Instead of boring everyone with all the little details, I'll just post some pictures and we'll go from there...

This is my brother and his fiance Christmas morning at my parents house. That giant smile on his face is because he's about to open the Wii my parents gave them. Wii makes me smile too...

My other younger brother opening up one of the many sweatshirts he got...

Have you ever seen someone this happy to get a level? Granted it's a really cool level, but still. I think Dad needs to get out more..

Mom and Dad opening the GPS we gave them. As you can see, they apparently took this gift very seriously haha...

The wife opening up her gift from me. I pulled a "Georgia" on her (Georgia is my cousins grandmother up here. she wraps all her gifts to you the same way. a box in a box in a box, etc, all of which are wrapped up nicely) and she seemed to like everything I got her, which included this cool cup cake decorating book. She loves decorating cakes and what not. I guess that helps explain my gut....

The wife again, with Tommy my cousins baby and my godson. What a cute kid huh..


And of course me with Tommy. As you can see, he's a very happy baby...
My parents gave us a video camera for Christmas too, so someday when I figure it out, there might be a new element added to the blog, movies...

Merry Christmas

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas! to everyone out there...

I'll be back Sunday with a full post, lots of pictures, and all that.

Have a happy and safe holiday everyone...

The Weekend

So it was a busy and productive yet uneventful weekend up here. We didn't really get any snow Friday, but we're getting slammed now (16-18 inches by the time its done tomorrow they're saying)

Saturday night we went over my uncles house for some pizza and to hang out. We won't get to see them on Christmas so it was nice spending some time with them now. Figures though, the minute we get real snow (which mean snow mobiling), I'm not going to be around to enjoy it. Stupid holiday getting in the way of fun :)

We got all our wrapping and shopping done which is nice. And we just have a little more baking to finish up. My lovely wife spent pretty much the entire day in the kitchen baking cookies (choc chip and sugar) and various shapes of gingerbread cookies. Good times.

As you can see, Sarah looks positively enthralled to be doing this...

This picture I just thought was cool. The xmas lights are lined up on the retaining wall in front of our house. The snow has piled up on the wall, and all you can see is the light trying to shine thru. Neat huh...

Quiet Week

Not much to report on really. The wife is down in Boston, last night and tonight, coming home tomorrow night, for work so it's been pretty quiet up here. Crazy busy at work, but who isn't this time of year, right.

Finished all my major xmas shopping and wrapping which is nice too. I just need to buy some stocking stuffers for the wife, so if anyone has any ideas, feel free to share...

We did get three or so inches of snow today. I really don't mind shoveling that much, expect I find I'm kind of neurotic about it. I can't just shovel out enough space on the drive way for our two cars, I need to shovel the entire drive way (it's about five cars long probably). My thinking is what if someone comes by? It's a pain to park in the street and have to walk around all the snow to get to the sidewalk. What if someone comes to visit overnight? They're going to need room to park their car right? This way, if it snows again, I won't have to shovel the new snow plus the old snow. I have issues, I know...

As you can tell, I'm just a little bored...man I need some Maine friends haha...

Ice, Food and Videotape

Well, not really videos, more like digital camera short videos... more on that later..


I'm assuming everyone has seen this video already, but I thought I'd post it anyway. Notice the Presidents ninja like reaction, quickly ducking the thrown shoe. Pretty impressive actually..


So that ice storm that came in Friday...pretty nasty stuff. Luckily we didn't lose power, but my uncle did lose his cable, which is sorta like losing power cuz what are you supposed to do without cable?


It left about an inch of ice everywhere. As you can see in the following clips, our driveway is more like a skating rink at this point..

But not to be outdone..

(btw, no idea why the came in sideways. when i watch them on my computer they're the correct way)

We also did a lot of cooking this weekend. I tried making calzones.. let's see, I made a meatball and mozzarella, a steak and cheese, and a sausage and pepperoni one. I didn't use enough filling in the steak and cheese, but that's easily fixed. Otherwise they came out pretty darn tasty. We also made a sheppards pie, but we need to tinker with that recipe some more..

And lastly.. for the past six months or so I've been getting this person calling me on my cell phone. Obviously it's a wrong number, but the people on the other end don't speak english, so they don't understand me when I yell at them that it's the wrong number. They call at all hours of the day/night, and don't just call once. The other day they called 18 times. So I called Verizon and it turns out they can't block the number because it's international. It turns out, the number is from Somalia. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to get them to stop calling, please feel free to let me know.

Is It The Weekend Yet?

• Right now it's icing out. Not snowing, not raining, icing. This is not a good thing. I just hope that the ice doesn't take down any power lines. I can't live without electricity. No tv? No computer? No cooking? I'd have to like read a book, or talk to my wife or something crazy like that..
• So yesterday at about 5:15pm, I dropped off some stuff for work along with a NetFlix dvd at the post office. This morning at 7:10am I get an email from NetFlix stating that they've received my dvd and they'll be mailing out the new one today and I can expect to get it tomorrow. How fantastic is that? The post office is so fast up here...
• The wife and I have finally discovered the Food Network and now we're fully addicted. The nice part is, we get tons of ideas for dinners, etc, the bad part is that when I'm laying in bed at 10:30 at night and they're at a diner in Phily eating a steak and cheese... well .. I then want a steak and cheese..mmmmm
• Speaking of food... last night we (the wife finds the recipe and i cook it) made a chicken stir fry. Everything from scratch, the sauce, everything. Very very tasty. And tonight I made a sheppards pie. Again, surprisingly good. The best part is, I learn how to make these dishes and can then expand/tinker with them to get them to how we like them.

Diamonds For Jesus?

• So I've started drinking coffee...decaf... mostly because I don't drink caffeine at all so when I do it gives me headaches and makes me dizzy. The problem is this though. Dunkin Donuts does not carry either soy milk or nondairy creamers. At first I thought it was a Maine thing, so I emailed them only to find out that it's a company wide thing. That just doesn't make sense to me. Do they think that the lactose intolerant among us don't drink coffee? Starbucks is further away and so much more expensive, but Dunkins has left me with no choice. I have started brewing the occasional cup at home and adding my own lactaid or whatever, but it's just not the same...
• Tuesday I woke up and it was 8 degrees. Wednesday I woke up and it was 56 degrees. Gotta love living in New England...
• Have you ever noticed that if you wake up at like three in the morning and can't fall back asleep, time tends to move extraordinarily slow. But if you wake up ten minutes before your alarm is set to go off, time seems to move extraordinarily fast...
• So there's an ad playing on the radio up here. Some jewelery store (not sure if it's national or local chain), trying to get people to come in and buy diamonds for Xmas. Well their ad states the following, "we believe that God put the most precious stones near those who need the money most. So every cent made from purchasing these diamonds goes right to the impoverished person that found it." Ummm what? They're calling them "fair trade diamonds". So instead of just giving them a better life, Jesus buried these stones in the earth so these people could find them and eventually, maybe make money off it? Riiiiiiiight...talk about a sleazy marketing ploy..

Somebody Has A Case Of The Tuesdays...

Well besides the normal year end craziness that accompanies my job, I awoke this morning to find another surprise. So I went outside this morning to let the car warm up for a few minutes before heading to work. Sensible, right? It was like 8 degrees out so it only makes sense. Ten minutes later, I move the wife's car out of the driveway so I can get my car out, and leave for work. About a hundred yards down the street, I notice something doesn't feel quite right with the car, but I do recognize the sound it's making. That's because it's the same noise it made last week except on the other side of the car. ANOTHER FRICKIN FLAT TIRE!!! Are you kidding me! I have had exactly one flat tire in my 15 years of driving prior to moving to Maine. In the past 15 months I've had THREE! And all of them have occurred in the winter. Nothing like changing a tire in the frigid cold.

Weekend Report

So lets see. Friday night was pretty tame. The wife and I made our own pizza's for dinner (me pepperoni, her pesto with artichokes) and surprisingly enough they didn't turn out half bad. The bad half came though when she made me watch 27 Dresses. Just a horrible movie. The main character isn't likable at all and her sister is ever worse. I kept waiting for the main guy in the movie, who was also in X-Men, to whip off his sunglasses and kill everyone (or at least me) with his laser beam eyes. Alas.. I wasn't that lucky...

Saturday was spent mostly just hanging around the house, which was nice. After an afternoon trip to the bookstore, we went to the parade the city was having. It went right thru downtown and consisted mostly of big rigs pulling flat beds full of nativity scenes, kids dancing and singing, and random people waving to the crowd. It was one of those nights that makes you appreciate small town life ya know. And we got lucky, it was in the low 30's, but no wind at all, so it was actually pretty nice out.

Sunday we went and did a couple of quick errands before settling in for the afternoon. Me in front of my tv for football and the wife in front of hers and the fireplace for Harry Potter. Great day really...

I did learn something very alarming about my lovely wife though. Apparently she had no idea that the drummer from Def Lepard only has one arm! How is this possible? I thought everyone knew this! Who hasn't seen the VH1 Behind the Music about them.. "everyone was riding high, then tragedy struck..." (typical BTM line, right) Great stuff really. How did this come up you ask? Well we were watching a show called Crossroads, where they take a country act and pair them with someone completely different. In this case it was Def Lepard and Taylor Swift and surprisingly enough the music was actually really good.

Can you believe it's already the second week of December? Before you know it, it'll be New Years, then 2009.. Only 3 more weeks till Christmas...

Is It The Weekend Yet?

Longest week ever...

Anyway.. so back in the day, whenever I'd leave a store or wherever and there was one of those bell ringers from the Salvation Army outside, I'd always drop a couple of bucks into the bucket. The past couple of years though, I've completely stopped carrying money, I use my credit/debit cards for everything (unless of course I'm going to a bar, then I have cash on me. then again, when I leave the bar i usually don't have any money left). So now whenever I leave a store and the bell ringer is outside, I always feel super guilty. I feel like I should pretend to talk on my cell phone as I walk out, or look in the other direction pretending I don't ever see or hear them. Does this make me a bad person...

So the wife and I are watching House the other day. Right in the middle of the show, in mid sentence, the show cuts out and the commercials start. All local commercials, maybe 4-5 in total ran. After they were done, it cut back to the show (still in progress) and eventually to the next commercial break. During the break, the FOX symbol appeared on the television and just changed color for a couple of minutes. See, some dumbass down at the local affiliate hit the wrong button and showed the commercials at the wrong time, making us miss like three minutes of our show.. not cool at all...

And it's official... Divas, our local neighborhood bikini bar has closed. On the way to work the other day everything looked normal. On the way home all the signage was gone and for the first time the curtains were open and you could actually see inside. I would say it's a sad day when a bar closes, but I never went, so it's not so sad for me...

If you need a good laugh , I strongly suggest you check this out...

Forgot to mention.. we watched Baby Mama the other day (it was the wife's turn to pick the movie). I wanted to like it cuz I really love Tina Fey, but it just wasn't good. There was like 2 funny lines in the entire movie, very disappointing..

Can you believe it's December already? Doesn't it feel like Y2K was just the other day, and now it's almost 2009. Holy crap...

Quick Update

So we got a bit of good news today. Both our home study and profile have been approved so we're pretty much good to go. We hit Staples tonight to get our profile all printed up on fancy paper, in color, with a cool binder thingy holding it all together. What we needed to do was, to make ten copies and tomorrow I'll mail them to the adoption agency in Portland. Once they receive them (the mail takes one day here in Maine, so they'll get it Thursday), we'll officially be in circulation.

So that means no more paperwork...just lots and lots and lots of waiting to get picked. Basically whenever the phone rings, my first thought is going to be "is this the call?". Everyone involved in the process has told us that chances are we won't have to wait too long due to our age and openness (in regards to the sex/ethnicity of the baby). Hearing that is nice, but it's going to make it that much tougher if it doesn't happen sooner rather than later. And what is soon anyway? Two months? Four months? Six months? We've waited this long, so what's a bit longer right? Plus, it's all worth it in the end...